A house in Italy is inherited by three siblings. One stayed in Rome, one moved to Toronto in the 1990s, one followed a job to Melbourne. They agree, in principle, to sell. What actually slows the sale down is rarely a disagreement about price. It is the mechanics of getting three signatures that are never in the same country, let alone the same room, onto the same Italian deed.
The rule itself is short
Where a property passed to more than one heir, Italian law treats it as co-owned in undivided shares (comunione ereditaria). A sale of the whole property needs every co-owner's consent — there is no majority vote that binds a dissenting heir, and no single heir can sign away the others' shares. We cover that rule, and what happens when one heir refuses outright, in our note on selling an inherited Italian property. What that note does not have room for is what changes when "every co-owner" means three people on three continents, in three time zones, each dealing with their own country's notary, bank and courier service.
Pick one heir to be the point of contact
Nothing in Italian law requires equal participation in the paperwork. What works in practice is naming one heir — often, but not always, whoever still lives in or regularly visits Italy — as the point of contact for the notary and the estate agent, while the others act through a power of attorney in that person's favour, or in favour of the family's Italian lawyer. This does not reduce anyone's share of the proceeds or their say in the price; it just means the notary coordinates with one inbox instead of three, across one time zone instead of three.
Each heir's power of attorney has to clear their own country's rules first
A power of attorney signed abroad needs an apostille before an Italian notary will accept it, and the authority that issues the apostille is different in every country. For the sibling in Toronto, that is a Canadian provincial authority — a process that only opened up in January 2024, when Canada joined the Apostille Convention; before that, the same document needed full consular legalisation, a slower route some documents may still need to follow if a particular Canadian province has not yet caught up. For the sibling in Melbourne, it is the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. For the sibling who stayed in Italy, no apostille is needed at all — just a document signed in front of an Italian notary directly. None of this is interchangeable: a Canadian apostille does not authorise an Australian document, and a POA prepared for one heir cannot simply be copied for another with the country name changed. We set out the document itself, and the sworn translation that normally has to accompany it, in signing a power of attorney without travelling to Italy.
The succession paperwork has to be finished — once, for all three
Before any sale, the inheritance itself has to be formally declared and the property's title updated to show all three heirs, a step we set out fully in our note on the succession declaration for a foreign heir. With heirs spread across countries, the practical risk is not the rule itself but duplicated or missed paperwork: each heir needs their own Italian tax code (codice fiscale), and each needs to be named correctly and consistently across the declaration, the land registry update and the eventual deed. A mismatch between how a name appears on a Canadian passport and how it was transcribed on an Italian document is a common, avoidable cause of delay at this stage, and it is far easier to fix before the file reaches the notary than after.
What each heir's own country does with the proceeds
Italy's own tax treatment of the sale is explained in the note on selling an inherited property linked above, but once the proceeds are split, each heir answers to their own tax authority, on their own terms. A Canadian heir's position on the eventual sale connects back to the deemed disposition already assessed when the death occurred, which we cover in the Canadian T1135 reporting note. An Australian heir's position is a separate calculation again, set out in our note on Australian capital gains tax on an inherited Italian property. Neither figure is produced by the Italian side of the transaction, and neither should be left until after the money has already moved — tell each heir's own accountant when a sale is agreed, not once it has closed.
Splitting and moving the money
Once the deed is signed, the proceeds are usually received into a single account before being divided and wired on to each heir in their own country. Italian banks apply anti-money-laundering checks to large transfers, and those checks tend to take longer, not shorter, when the destination accounts are abroad and held in a different name from the seller of record. Agreeing in advance which account receives the funds, and what identification each receiving bank will want on arrival, avoids the proceeds sitting in transit for longer than anyone expects. Build in extra time for this step rather than assuming it clears in a day.
When one heir cannot be reached, or will not engage
Co-ownership across continents makes the ordinary risk of inheritance disputes — one heir who is slow to respond, difficult to reach, or simply unwilling to sell — harder to manage, not different in kind. The routes out of a genuine deadlock, including judicial partition where agreement proves impossible, are the same ones available to any group of co-heirs and are set out in the note on the succession declaration linked above. What distance adds is time: formal notice to an heir abroad, and any court step that follows, takes longer to serve and longer to resolve than the same step between two people living in the same Italian town. Raising the question early, before a buyer is found, costs far less than discovering it once an offer is already on the table.
Every one of these steps depends on how many heirs are involved, which countries they live in, and how the title currently stands, so none of the above should be read as the answer for a particular file — only as the shape the process tends to take. The first consultation is free, and it is with a lawyer who has coordinated exactly this kind of sale before.