Dying Without a Will in Italy: Italian Intestacy Rules for Foreigners
Dying Without a Will in Italy: Italian Intestacy Rules for Foreigners
When someone dies without a will in Italy — or with a will that doesn't cover Italian assets — Italian intestacy rules determine who gets what. For English-speaking expats and their families, these rules produce outcomes that are often dramatically different from what they'd expect under US, UK, or Australian law.
The biggest shock: unmarried partners inherit nothing. The second biggest shock: the distribution formula leaves very little room for the deceased's intentions to matter after the fact.
Who Inherits Under Italian Intestacy
Italian intestacy follows a strict hierarchical order based on family relationship. The higher categories exclude the lower ones:
Spouse and children together: If there's a surviving spouse and one child, each gets half the estate. If there are two or more children, the spouse gets one-third and the children split two-thirds equally. The spouse also gets a lifelong right to inhabit the family home and use its furnishings.
Spouse only (no children): The spouse gets two-thirds. The remaining one-third goes to the deceased's parents if alive, or siblings. If there are no parents or siblings, the spouse gets everything.
Children only (no spouse): The children split the estate equally.
Parents and siblings: If there's no spouse and no children, parents get the estate. If parents and siblings both survive, parents get at least half. Siblings split the remainder.
Extended relatives: If none of the above survive, inheritance passes through increasingly distant relatives up to the sixth degree of kinship — first cousins, great-aunts, second cousins. Beyond the sixth degree, the estate goes to the Italian state.
The Unmarried Partner Problem
Under Italian law, an unmarried partner — even one who lived with the deceased for 20 years, raised children together, and shared every financial obligation — has zero automatic inheritance rights. They are a legal stranger to the estate.
The 2016 Cirinnà Law created two categories that people often confuse:
Civil unions (unioni civili): Full spousal rights for same-sex couples and, in some interpretations, different-sex couples who register. Civil union partners inherit exactly as a spouse would — including forced heirship protection and INPS survivor pension rights.
Registered cohabitation (convivenza di fatto): The couple registers at the Comune but does not form a civil union. These partners get a temporary right to remain in the shared home (two to five years depending on cohabitation length) and a right to be appointed as legal guardian if the partner becomes incapacitated. But they get zero inheritance rights.
This means that when an Italian-resident expat dies intestate, their long-term unmarried partner watches the entire estate pass to the deceased's biological relatives — parents, siblings, even distant cousins — while the partner who shared their daily life gets nothing beyond temporary housing.
The tax treatment compounds the problem. Even when a will does leave assets to an unmarried partner (from the freely disposable share), the partner pays the highest inheritance tax rate: 8% with no tax-free exemption, compared to 4% with a €1 million exemption for a spouse.
Which Country's Law Actually Applies?
Under Brussels IV (EU Regulation 650/2012), the law of the country where the deceased was habitually resident at death governs the succession — unless the deceased made a choice-of-law election in a will choosing their nationality's law instead.
Without a will (which is the whole point of intestacy), there's no choice-of-law election. So Italian intestacy rules apply automatically if the deceased was habitually resident in Italy. This is true regardless of the deceased's nationality: an American living in Florence, a British retiree in Puglia, an Australian teacher in Milan — all default to Italian intestacy.
The practical consequence: English-speaking expats who assume their assets will pass "naturally" to their partner, their best friend, or their preferred charity are wrong. Without a will containing a Brussels IV clause, Italian intestacy rules override whatever they assumed would happen.
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Steps Heirs Should Take
If you're an heir under Italian intestacy:
Confirm your position. Italian notaries determine the order of heirs using vital records (birth, marriage, death certificates). As a foreign heir, you'll need your documents apostilled and translated.
File within 12 months. The succession declaration deadline doesn't change just because there's no will. Heirs must file and self-assess taxes within the same 12-month window.
Consider renunciation. If the estate has more debts than assets, heirs can renounce within 10 years (or 3 months if in possession of estate assets). Acceptance with benefit of inventory (accettazione con beneficio d'inventario) limits liability to the estate's value.
Watch for tacit acceptance. Under Italian law, certain actions constitute implicit acceptance of the inheritance — withdrawing money from the deceased's account, selling estate assets, or even just clearing out their apartment. Once you've tacitly accepted, you can't renounce and you're personally liable for the estate's debts.
The Italy expat death guide covers the full intestacy framework with distribution calculators for every family composition, plus step-by-step guidance for foreign heirs navigating Italian succession without a will.
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