The paper presents the first phase of the core research “Energy screening of the building heritage of the University of Ferrara and preliminary proposals for the retrofit strategies planning phase”, started from a dual need of the Management of the University of Ferrara: first, the necessity of having appropriate tools for an effective energy audit, due to the Italian implementation of the Legislative Decree 102/2014 (transposition of the European Directive 2012/27/EU), demanding the Public Sector to produce the Energy Performance Certificate of all their buildings in the near future; second, the request for a tool to plan the most effective energy refurbishment of its building stock to optimize its financial resources. The first phase of the research starts from the know-how acquired in the energy management of large real estates, which led to identify targeted retrofit strategies for new, recent or ancient buildings thanks to an easy and swift procedure specifically codified for this aim. The objective of the research is hence the development of a parametric energy assessment tool to ease the planning of retrofit actions, preliminarily considering both the effects of the energy improvement, and the cost/benefit ratio of planned operations. As a first step, the buildings of the heterogeneous campus of the University of Ferrara were grouped in subgroups (clusters), accounting for typological and technological characteristics. For each cluster, a representative building (head-cluster building) was selected in order to determine a characteristic pattern of the energy demands that could be later extended to all the other facilities belonging to the same categories. A digital model of this building was implemented and some energy simulations under quasi-steady state method were run being later compared to the figures provided by the official energy recordings collected from the energy provider bills. This allowed adjusting the energy model of the head-cluster building, finally identifying specific parametric indexes to characterize the energy behaviour and the retrofit potential of all the other buildings belonging to the same clusters. In the future, the research will define a parametric procedure to run suitable energy simulations on buildings, and provide a first energy and financial assessment of their benefits to the University Management, thus optimizing its resources and time.