A marriage celebrated abroad must be transcribed at the competent Italian municipality to have value in Italy.
How to Transcribe a Marriage Certificate in Italy?
The marriage certificate in original format that has been issued by the foreign Civil Status Office must be legalized and translated and must be sent, by the interested parties, to the diplomatic-consular representation that will take care of the transmission to Italy in order to be able to transcribe in the civil status registers of the competent Municipality.
Alternatively, the deed must be presented, legalized and translated, directly to the Municipality of membership, as reported in art. 12, paragraph 11, of Presidential Decree 396/2000
What documents are needed to obtain the transcription?
In general, for the transcription of the marriage certificate in Italy, the marriage certificate issued by the competent Civil Registry Office of the foreign country in which the marriage was celebrated is required, in the original or in a certified copy of the original and duly translated into Italian, even if the documentation may change depending on the country where the marriage was celebrated.
Documents issued by countries that have signed the 1976 Vienna Convention on the Issue of Multilingual Extracts of Civil Status Documents are exempt from legalization and translation.
How are the property relations of a marriage celebrated abroad regulated?
Property relations between spouses are governed by the law that governs personal relations, i.e. the common national law or, if the spouses have different or multiple citizenships, by the law of the place where family life is predominantly located.
In the case of a marriage celebrated abroad, the family property regime will be established by Italian law, if the spouses are Italian or in the case of different or dual nationalities if permanently resident in Italy, Italian law does not apply where, even if resident in Italy, the spouses both possess the same foreign citizenship, in which case the latter prevails over the place of residence and the place of celebration of the marriage.
Therefore, anyone who resides permanently in Italy and gets married abroad will be subject to the rules of Italian family law with regard to the personal and patrimonial regime of the family.
Even in this case, unless the spouses expressly provide otherwise, the legal matrimonial property regime of community of property will apply to the foreign marriage.
Marriage Abroad and Same-Sex Couples
Although same-sex marriage is not permitted in Italy, our legal system does allow civil unions that allow people of the same sex to assume – more or less – the same rights and duties that derive from marriage.
It follows that even the celebration of such a union celebrated abroad will also have effects in Italy if regularly transcribed in the Civil Status registers, in this case the act will be transcribed as a civil union and not as a marriage.