Our mission is to provide the highest quality legal service with integrity, professionalism and respect. To empower our team of Italian property and inheritance law solicitors to utilise their extensive experience to serve our clients reliably and effectively. To keep abreast of latest case law and strive to be leaders in our specialist fields. Clients, both domestic and international, can rely upon De Tullio Law Firm to provide the very best in legal advice and case management.
Knowing exactly where you stand before you view properties, you increase your chance of finding the right property first time and avoiding wasted trips and the expense of repeat visits and false starts.
We provide an independent and professional pre-purchase property background check service. That way, you can avoid problems such as buying a property with shared title deeds, other legal and financial complications, structural or planning permission issues.
We also provide a pre-sales property background check service for owners preparing to put Italian property on the real estate market. Having all the legal and structural details as part of your property sales package offers vendors a competitive advantage when promoting property for sale.
De Tullio Law Firm can give you full legal support in the field of inheritance law. Should you own assets in Italy and feel the need to draft a Will or need help with Italian succession documents, we can support you.
Italian succession law is based on the Roman Law principle which gives some protection to close members of the family, partially limiting the right of the testator to dispose of his/her own assets. Testamentary Succession is defined as the assignment of the hereditary assets in compliance with the wishes of the testator as set out in an Italian Will whereas in the absence of a Will inheritance is devolved following the principles of Legal Succession.
Where there is no will, succession law gives rights to a number of legitimate heirs who have rights to the assets of the deceased. Such heirs are the spouse of the deceased and the relatives identified by the law starting from the closer ones until the 6th degree of connection.
Italian succession law reserves a significant quota of the inheritance to very close relatives: spouse, ascendants and descendents are all defined as “forced heirs”, meaning that the testator cannot exclude them with their Will. When drafting an Italian will, the testator is free to dispose of a part of his assets known as “disposable quota”. This allows the testator to assign only part of their assets to strangers or non‐relatives.
Succession law is based on unity of inheritance which highlights the difference between property and non‐property assets: the law of the last domicile or citizenship of the deceased party is applicable to non‐property assets, while the law of the country where the property is located is applied to property assets. Therefore, properties in different countries will be regulated by the law of the country where each property is located. The succession procedure is deemed to be closed when all assets, rights and pending payments have been transferred to the rightful heirs either by mutual agreement or as consequence of judicial proceedings and when all Italian succession documents have been verified. Agreement of inheritance is then produced in written form and signed by the relevant parties.
