If you own property in Italy and your family includes a spouse, a partner from an earlier marriage, or children from more than one relationship, there is a rule that surprises almost every common-law client: you cannot leave your Italian estate to whoever you choose. Italian law reserves a share of it, by force of law, for certain close relatives — regardless of what your will says. This is forced heirship, successione necessaria, and it is the single fact that most often turns a straightforward-looking estate plan into a dispute.
Who is protected, and why it overrides a will
The protected relatives — legittimari, sometimes called forced heirs or legitimate heirs — are the surviving spouse (or the civil partner, treated the same way), the children, and, only where there are no children, the ascendants (parents). Siblings are not protected: an estate can be left away from a brother or sister entirely.
The reserve is not a suggestion a court weighs case by case. It is a fixed entitlement that exists independently of the will's wording, and it can be enforced against the will itself. A will that ignores it is not void — it takes effect — but a protected heir who received less than their share can bring an action to claw back the difference, as explained below.
The share you can give away, and the share you cannot
Italian succession law splits an estate into two conceptual parts: a disposable portion, which the deceased can leave to anyone, in any proportion, by will; and a reserved portion, which by law belongs to the protected relatives. How that reserved portion is split among a spouse and children — and whether it changes when there is one child, several children, or no spouse — depends on the exact family situation at the time of death, and the fractions are set by statute rather than by discretion. Because getting this wrong has direct financial consequences for real people, the precise split for your family should be confirmed with an Italian lawyer against the current text of the Codice Civile rather than assumed from a general description.
What matters for planning purposes is simpler: whatever the exact fraction, it is not zero, and it cannot be contracted around by a foreign will that simply omits a protected relative.
Choosing the law that governs your estate
Here is where an American, British, Irish, Canadian or Australian client usually assumes the problem does not apply to them, and is usually wrong. Under the EU Succession Regulation (650/2012), the law that applies to a whole estate — not just the Italian property in it — is by default the law of the deceased's last habitual residence. If that residence was in Italy, Italian forced heirship can apply to worldwide assets, not only the Italian ones.
The Regulation does allow an alternative: a person can choose, expressly in their will, that the law of their nationality governs their succession instead. An American, British, Irish, Canadian or Australian national can elect the law of their home country, which generally does not have forced heirship, and that election is respected by Italian courts and registries even though none of those countries are themselves bound by the Regulation. What this means in practice is the opposite of what most people expect: the protection against Italian forced heirship is not automatic for a foreigner — it has to be written into the will, explicitly, in the right form. A will drafted at home that never mentions Italy, or an old will made before Italian assets were acquired, will usually not contain that election.
If a will gives less than the reserved share
A protected heir who receives less than their entitlement — because the will favoured someone else, or because lifetime gifts already used up the disposable portion — can bring an azione di riduzione, an action for reduction, against the will and, where needed, against the gifts themselves. Succeeding reduces what the other beneficiaries received, sometimes reaching assets already transferred to a third party who bought from an heir in good faith, subject to protections that depend on how much time has passed. This is not a theoretical risk: it is the standard route a disappointed spouse or child takes, and it is why an Italian estate that looks settled on paper can still be reopened years later.
Lifetime gifts count too
Forced heirship is not only about the will. Significant gifts made during the deceased's lifetime — a deposit on a property, funds to start a business, an outright transfer of an Italian asset to one child — are brought back into account when the reserved shares are calculated, through a mechanism called collazione. A parent who gives an Italian apartment to one child and leaves nothing in the will to another cannot use the gift to sidestep the reserve: the gift is added back notionally to work out what each protected heir was owed, and the shortfall can still be reduced. Structuring lifetime transfers without accounting for this is one of the more common and avoidable mistakes in cross-border estate planning — see Italian Will vs Trust for how this interacts with a trust holding Italian assets, since placing property in a trust does not, by itself, remove it from the reserve calculation either.
What this means depending on where you are from
For an American client, the instinct is usually to write a single US will covering everything, on the assumption that "my will controls my estate." For a British or Irish client the word is often testamentary freedom, treated as close to absolute at home — Italy has no equivalent principle for a spouse or child. For a Canadian or Australian client the concern is usually the reverse: provincial or state dependants' relief legislation lets a court adjust a will after the fact if it is unfair, which feels similar to forced heirship but works quite differently — Italy's reserve is fixed in advance, not awarded afterwards at a judge's discretion. In every case, the practical answer is the same: an Italian asset needs either an Italian will, or a foreign will drafted with the Italian rules and the nationality election in mind, prepared alongside the wider picture described in cross-border succession.
What to do before you sign anything
Check whether any existing will mentions Italy at all, and whether it makes an explicit choice of the law of nationality — silence is not a choice. If Italian assets were acquired after a will was signed, treat the will as out of date for that reason alone. If lifetime gifts of Italian property have already been made to some family members and not others, get the numbers looked at now, while adjustments are still possible, rather than leaving the azione di riduzione as the only remedy later. The starting point for the practical filing steps that follow a death, once forced heirship has been accounted for, is in the Italian succession declaration.
Every family situation changes the calculation — the presence of a spouse, the number of children, whether gifts were already made. The first consultation is free, and it is the right place to work out what your specific estate actually reserves, and for whom.