Couples who married in Italy and now live in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland or Australia tend to assume that if the marriage needs to end, it ends wherever they currently live. Often it can. What surprises most of them is that Italy can still have a say, sometimes years after anyone involved last set foot there — and that once a court somewhere is seised of the case, the other court's willingness to hear it stops being the relevant question.
Two courts can both be right
This is not a case of one court being correct and the other mistaken. Jurisdiction rules exist precisely because more than one country can have a legitimate connection to the same marriage: the place it was celebrated, the couple's nationality, and the place they actually live rarely point to only one country. Registering a foreign marriage, divorce or death in Italy deals with the later step — getting a divorce that has already been granted recognised in the Italian civil registers. This is the earlier question: which court gets to grant it in the first place, when both are plausible candidates.
When Italy can hear it, even from a distance
Italian courts can have jurisdiction over a divorce where the marriage was celebrated in Italy, where one spouse holds Italian citizenship, or where a spouse is resident or domiciled in Italy, depending on which rule applies to the particular facts. The citizenship ground is the one that catches people off guard: an Italian citizen who married abroad, or who married in Italy decades ago and has not lived there since, can still find an Italian court willing to take the case, brought by the other spouse as much as by themselves. None of this is automatic, and which specific ground applies — and whether it actually gives Italy jurisdiction on your facts — depends on rules that differ by nationality mix and have genuine exceptions. This is exactly the kind of question to have checked before filing anywhere, not after.
Where EU and non-EU couples diverge
If both spouses are connected to the European Union — an Italian married to an Irish national, for instance — jurisdiction between the two EU courts is decided under the EU's own family-law regulation, which looks mainly at habitual residence and, to a lesser extent, nationality. The United Kingdom is no longer inside that regulation following Brexit, which is a change worth stating plainly because it reverses what many British clients still assume: a UK-Italy divorce today is assessed under Italy's ordinary private international law rules (its governing statute is Law 218/1995), the same framework that applies to a US, Canadian or Australian spouse, not under the EU regime that still governs an Irish-Italian case.
First to file is not a technicality
Once one of the two courts is formally seised — the case properly filed and the other spouse notified, not merely threatened — the general principle is that it proceeds, and the other court is expected to stand back rather than run a competing case to a competing judgment. Two final divorce decrees from two countries, each valid where it was issued and each silent about the other, is not a theoretical risk; it is the specific outcome this rule exists to prevent, and it is far harder to unwind afterwards than to avoid by filing deliberately rather than reactively. If you are weighing where to file, that decision is better made with advice in hand than made by whichever spouse happens to act first.
Why the choice is not only about convenience
Where a divorce is granted affects more than which building you or your lawyer attend. Property division, spousal maintenance and the treatment of a pension earned during the marriage are governed by the law the deciding court applies to those questions — which is not always the same as the law of the forum itself — and the frameworks genuinely differ: Italy's default matrimonial regime and its approach to post-divorce maintenance work on different premises than equitable distribution in most of the United States and Canada, or the broader discretion English and Australian courts apply to matrimonial property. None of this means one forum produces a better result for a given spouse; it means the two systems ask different questions, and which one asks them is decided by jurisdiction, not by preference stated afterwards.
What a foreign spouse should check before filing anywhere
Whether Italy has jurisdiction on the specific facts, and separately whether the other country does too. Whether a case is already pending in either country, even one not yet served. Whether the marriage, and any prior Italian proceedings connected to it, are correctly reflected in the Italian civil registers — an unregistered foreign element has a way of resurfacing in the Italian case at the least convenient moment. And whether a decree obtained in one country will need separate recognition in the other before it can be relied on for property, a pension, or a later Italian succession involving the same family.
Where a lawyer fits
The work that matters happens before either court is approached: establishing which jurisdictions are genuinely open, understanding what each would apply to the financial questions, and filing — if filing in Italy is the right answer — before a decision made elsewhere forecloses it. What to ask before you instruct an Italian lawyer sets out what that first conversation should cover. Every marriage and every move between countries produces a different answer here, which is why this needs its own assessment rather than a general rule — and that first conversation costs nothing.