People searching "Italian lawyer trustee" are usually asking one of two very different questions, and the answer depends on which one applies. The first: does my trust, holding Italian assets, need an Italian lawyer acting as trustee? The second: I already have a trustee somewhere else — do I need Italian counsel alongside them? Both are common, and worth separating before going further.
Why the question exists in the first place
Italy is a civil-law country and has no domestic trust law of its own — there is no Italian statute that creates trusts the way English or American law does. What Italy has instead is recognition. It ratified the Hague Convention on the Law Applicable to Trusts and on their Recognition through Law No. 364 of 16 October 1989, and since then Italian courts and notaries have accepted trusts governed by a foreign legal system even when the settlor, the beneficiaries, or the assets are entirely Italian. Lawyers call this a "trust interno" — an internal trust, built on foreign trust law but living inside Italy.
That gap between "no domestic trust law" and "trusts are recognized anyway" is exactly what makes the role of an Italian lawyer confusing, and exactly why the search phrase does not resolve to a single, obvious answer.
What a trustee actually does
A trustee holds legal title to the trust's assets and manages them for the beneficiaries, according to the terms of the trust deed and the law chosen to govern it. That governing law is almost never Italian law itself, precisely because Italian law has no trust rules to choose. English law, Jersey law, and the law of a handful of other jurisdictions with developed trust statutes are the ones typically selected — even for a trust that will only ever hold a house in Tuscany.
The trustee's job does not change because the assets sit in Italy. What changes is who can actually execute the paperwork that Italian institutions require.
Where an Italian lawyer fits
An Italian lawyer is not, by default, the trustee. The trustee is whoever the trust deed names — often a professional trustee company, sometimes an individual, governed by the law the deed selects. What an Italian lawyer typically provides is one or more of the following, and it is worth naming each separately because they get bundled together in casual conversation:
- Counsel to the trustee on anything the trust touches that is governed by Italian law regardless of the trust's own governing law: real estate registration, Italian tax filings, the interaction between the trust and Italian forced-heirship rules if the settlor is Italian or Italian-domiciled.
- Local execution work, particularly transfers of Italian real estate into or out of the trust, which go through an Italian notary (notaio) rather than the trustee directly — the lawyer coordinates that step.
- Protector, a separate role some trust deeds create to oversee the trustee's decisions, which an Italian lawyer can hold without being the trustee at all.
- Trustee itself, in the less common structures where an Italian professional is named to that role directly in the deed — this is a decision made when the trust is drafted, not something added afterward.
Which of these applies to a given reader depends entirely on what the trust deed already says, which is why the honest first step is reading that document, not assuming a role.
The forced-heirship question a trust cannot avoid
A trust governed by foreign law does not remove Italian forced-heirship protections if the settlor is Italian, resident in Italy, or the assets are Italian real estate and the EU Succession Regulation points to Italian law. Those protections — reserved shares for a spouse, children, and in some cases parents — can be asserted by an heir who feels shortchanged, regardless of what the trust deed says. This is the single most common reason a trust interno ends up contested, and it is worth checking before assuming a trust settles the matter on its own. How a trust interacts with those reserved shares, compared with a straightforward Italian will, is covered in Italian will vs. trust.
If you are the one being asked to act
Occasionally the question runs the other way: a family member or a foreign trustee asks an Italian lawyer to formally take on the trustee role for Italian-situs assets. Before accepting, the lawyer needs the trust deed reviewed against the governing law it chooses, since the duties and liabilities of a trustee are defined by that law, not by Italian professional rules, even though the lawyer accepting them is admitted to practice in Italy.
Where to start
If a trust already exists, the first move is not choosing who acts as trustee — it is having the deed reviewed against the actual Italian assets it holds and the actual family situation behind it. If a trust does not exist yet and the goal is protecting Italian property from a distance, the estate-planning route may be simpler than a trust, and is described in family asset protection planning. Each situation carries its own facts, and a first review is what tells you which of these paths actually applies.