In order to achieve a selective removal of specific pesticides from water, we synthesized, through the sol-gel technique, molecularly imprinted TiO2 photocatalysts with the only use of the standard reactants for the TiO2 sol-gel synthesis together with the pesticide molecules, without any addition of further reactants, supports or matrices. It is a new, easy, smart and scalable method that avoid the multistep and solvent-consuming procedures, typical of the molecular imprinting. Two widely-used pesticides, i.e. the herbicide 2,4D, and the insecticide imidacloprid, were chosen as template for the molecular imprinting and as contaminants target for the photocatalytic tests. A remarkable enhancement of the photocatalytic activity was verified with the TiO2 imprinted with the corresponding pesticide-target. The selectivity of the photodegradation process was verified thanks to the comparison with the degradation of pesticides …