Italy: Principal Legal Publications

This is the citation apparatus for the Italy guide. It lists the publications an Italian footnote is most likely to point at, and names the fetched page behind each line.

The job of a list like this is narrow: to let somebody holding a reference work out which body issued the thing, whether it is a primary text or a report of one, and whether it is free.

How these fit together, and which version of a text governed on a given day, is set out in Researching the Law of Italy.

The gazette

One publication, run by the state printer, and the source of every gazette reference below.

Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana

Issued by the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato. Complete in searchable text, and in PDF facsimile back to 1861, which is how far a citation can be checked against the printed page. [1]

Consolidated legislation

A gazette reference locates an act as passed. Reading it as amended is a separate service.

Normattiva

Run under the Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, and titled the portal of the law in force. Every code page below is one of its records. [2]

The codes

Each line gives the act that approved the code, the gazette reference as Normattiva prints it, and the commencement date where the landing page states one. Each carries three labelled controls, not two: originario, the text as first published; multivigente, the text reconstructed as it stood on a chosen date; and vigente al, which sits beside a date field and its own Cerca button. This is the set traced to a page that could be read, not a count of Italian codes.

Codice civile

Regio decreto 16 marzo 1942, n. 262. GU n.79 del 04-04-1942. In force from 19 April 1942. [3]

Codice penale

Regio decreto 19 ottobre 1930, n. 1398. GU n.251 del 26-10-1930. In force from 1 July 1931. Normattiva adds that the annexed code was printed in volume VI of the Raccolta Ufficiale for 1930. [4]

Codice di procedura civile

Regio decreto 28 ottobre 1940, n. 1443. GU n.253 del 28-10-1940. The landing page carries no commencement line, so none is given here. [5]

Codice di procedura penale

Decreto del Presidente della Repubblica 22 settembre 1988, n. 447. GU n.250 del 24-10-1988, Supplemento Ordinario n. 92. In force from 24 October 1989. [6]

Codice della navigazione

Regio decreto 30 marzo 1942, n. 327. GU n.93 del 18-04-1942. In force from 21 April 1942. [7]

Law reports

Italian decisions reach a reader through reviews rather than an official reporter series, so the question is which reviews. The Ministry of Justice library answers it obliquely, by publishing the subject list of periodicals whose contents pages it scans. Under general law and court practice it names the Foro italiano, Giurisprudenza italiana, Guida al Diritto and the Rivista di diritto processuale among others.

Biblioteca Centrale Giuridica, review indices

The ministry library's subject list, and the nearest thing found here to an official view of which Italian reviews matter. [8]

Il Foro italiano

A general review in five parts, on the publisher's own account: civil, criminal, administrative, European Union and foreign, and monographs and miscellany. It says it reports on average more than a thousand decisions a year, each preceded by one or more massime drafted in house. [9]

Il Foro italiano, the editorship

The publisher lists the current direction first and then every earlier one in order, and that second list opens with Nicola De Crescenzio, Ferdinando Mecacci and Enrico Scialoja for 1876 and 1877. [10]

Digests

A digest turns a run of reviews into something searchable by subject, and it is the part least familiar outside Italy.

Repertorio del Foro italiano

An annual volume. The publisher says it gathers the massime and bibliographic citations from the Italian legal reviews, alongside legislation in the gazette, under subject headings drawn from statutory and working usage. The 2023 volume is dated 2024 and runs to 1546 pages. [11]

CED and ItalgiureWeb

Named because a reader will meet the names, and described no further: no connection to italgiure.giustizia.it completed from this machine, by either of two clients, so nothing here says what the service holds.

Reviewed 2026-08-31. 11 sources cited on this page.