Are you sure your marriage has actually been transcribed?

Are you sure your marriage has actually been regsitered in the registers of your Italian municipality?

Option 1: you are an Italian citizen that has married a foreign wife/husband and you would like her/him to become an Italian citizen.

Option 2: you are the foreign wife/husband that has married an Italian citizen and would like to apply for Italian citizenship.

So, in both cases, you start your research online and you discover that it is possible according to the Italian Law 91/92 art. 5, you learn about the process, you read the list of documents which includes the “estratto per riassunto dell’atto di matrimonio“ (which is the document that proves your marriage has been registered with your Italian Comune), and then you start collecting the other documents you need in order to apply.

When you get to the point where you want to request your estratto di matrimonio, you (or your wife/husband) remember that, as a good Italian citizen, you had already been to your local Italian Consulate (usually right after the marriage), to inform the Italian authorities that your marital status had changed. When you gave your papers to the clerk, you were informed that the Consulate would forward your papers to your ‘Comune‘. Therefore, your marriage was to be registered shortly after so that you could then request the estratto di matrimonio (i.e.certification that proves the registration of the marriage).

In light of the above, you logically think that it should be quite easy to obtain the estratto di matrimonio you need, probably from the Consulate itself (spoiler: unfortunately it is not possible. See point 3).

Well, there are actually a few things that you should know.

1. The first thing you should know is that in order to obtain an estratto di matrimonio from your Comune, your marriage must have actually been registered with your Comune. In fact, only after it has been registered can you ask your Italian Comune for an estratto di matrimonio. If you need to know more about this, please read our guides:

FAQ. Estratto per riassunto dell’atto di matrimonio

Transcription of marriages celebrated abroad in the Italian Registers of Civil Status

2. The second thing you should know is that, unfortunately, the fact that the Consulate has sent the papers (via post or via pec) to your Italian Comune, does not necessarily mean that the marriage has actually been registered, even if they sent the papers many years ago.

In fact, based on our experience, it has happened quite often that papers were sent from the Consulate to the Comune via post and were lost, or were sent to the wrong address, or were received by the wrong office of the Comune that did not pass them on to the competent office (it can happen in very big municipalities like Rome).

Moreover, it has also happened that the papers have been sent via pec (certified email), but to the wrong pec address of the Comune, or that some papers were missing (like Apostille, Cons01, translations etc.), because they had not been correctly scanned.

In many other cases, the Comune actually received the papers from the Consulate but forgot or did not have time to transcribe the marriage.

These are all cases that we have seen in the past years and that we keep seeing today, which mean that the applicant’s marriage has not been transcribed yet.

In light of the above, before asking your Comune to send you the estratto, it is advisable to check with the Comune if your marriage has actually been transcribed. In fact, if you do not have this information you risk wasting time because Italian municipalities can take a lot of time to answer even if they have to tell you that they cannot send you the estratto because they have no record of your marriage.

Therefore, if you send an email to info@vademecumitalia.com or if you fill out the Contact us form with your information, we can verify if your marriage has actually been transcribed into the registers of your Italian Comune.

Then, if your marriage has not been transcribed yet, we will tell you exactly what you need to do in order to register your marriage with your Comune.

If, on the contrary, we verify that your marriage has already been transcribed, we will send you a quotation of our fees for assistance with the request for an estratto di matrimonio.

Please note that if you are registered in the AIRE of the Comune di Roma, we can check the Comune di Roma database and tell you if your marriage has been registered or not within a few hours from receipt of your email.

3. Another thing you should know now is that the Italian Consulates do not provide this kind of service and, therefore, you will not obtain your estratto di matrimonio from them, because they are issued by the Italian municiplaities only.