Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights in Italy significantly advanced in the 21st century, thanks to both legislation and Constitutional Court and Supreme Court of Cassation rulings, although LGBTQ people still face various challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents, despite public opinion being increasingly liberal and in favor of LGBT rights. Both male and female same-sex sexual activity has been legal since 1890, when a new penal code was promulgated.
A civil union law was passed in May 2016, providing same-sex couples with all of the rights of marriage except for joint adoption rights. The law also recognizes same-sex couples as a family. Stepchild adoption was excluded from the bill, but in June 2016 the Supreme Court of Cassation stated that courts can allow a couple in a civil union to adopt their stepchildren. The same law provides both same-sex and heterosexual couples which live in an unregistered cohabitation with several legal rights. In May 2025, the Constitutional Court ruled that when a lesbian couple has a child through IVF abroad, both women can be automatically registered as the child's mothers, without having to go through stepchild adoption.
In April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that children with same-sex parents must have gender-neutral terms on their ID documents instead of “mother” and “father.” This change ensures that documents reflect the child's actual family structure and effectively removes a discriminatory rule. In July 2025, the Constitutional Court ruled that the non-biological mother in a lesbian couple is entitled to mandatory parental leave. In May 2026, the Constitutional Court ruled that surviving partners in same-sex marriages performed abroad are entitled to a survivor’s pension even if the spouse died before the 2016 Civil Unions Act, extending the entitlement retrospectively.
However, according to ILGA-Europe's 2021 report, the status of LGBT rights in Italy is below the standards of other Western European countries – such as still not recognizing same-sex marriage, lacking nationwide discrimination protections for goods and services, as well as not granting to same-sex couples full parental rights, such as joint adoption and IVF. Italy and Japan are the only G7 nations where same-sex marriages are not recognized.
Transgender people have been allowed to legally change their gender since 1982. Italy became the sixth country in the world to legally acknowledge the right of individuals to change their gender. Prior to this, only Denmark (1929), Sweden (1972), Chile (1974), Norway (1979), and West Germany (1980) had introduced similar legal recognition. The proposal for this legal reform faced little opposition: both chambers of the Italian Parliament unanimously agreed to assign the responsibility of finalising the law to their respective Standing Committees on Justice. As a result, once the Committees approved the draft, the law was enacted immediately, bypassing the need for additional votes in Parliament. Since 2015, undergoing surgery (sterilization) is no longer required in order to change one's legal gender in Italy. In 2020, hormone therapy became fully covered by the national healthcare system, making it accessible free of charge. More recently, in 2024, judicial authorisation is no longer necessary to access gender-affirming surgeries, as long as legal sex change has occurred, further reducing legal and bureaucratic barriers for transgender individuals seeking medical transition.
Although discrimination regarding sexual orientation in employment has been banned since 2003, no other anti-discrimination laws regarding sexual orientation or gender identity and expression have been enacted nationwide, although some Italian regions have enacted far more comprehensive anti-discrimination laws.
A 2025 Ipsos poll shows that 80% of Italians support legal recognition of same-sex unions. Meanwhile, an Eurispes survey reveals that 66.8% back same-sex marriage, and 63% support adoption by same-sex couples.
The Eurispes Italy Report highlights a substantial and sustained increase in Italian support for LGBT+ rights and recognition of diverse family structures. Support for marriage equality rose from 47.8% in 2016 to 50.9% in 2019, 58.4% in 2021, 59.2% in 2023 and 64.5% in 2024, representing an increase of almost 20 percentage points over the 10-year period. The 2026 findings show that this upward trend has continued, with 66% of Italians now expressing support for same-sex marriage, a figure broadly consistent with the 65% recorded in 2025. Legal protection for unmarried couples, regardless of sex, also enjoys widespread support. Approval increased slightly from 69.3% in 2024 to 69.6% in 2026. Attitudes towards same-sex parenting and adoption have also shifted. In 2024, 54.5% of Italians supported adoption by same-sex couples, an increase of 23.4 percentage points compared with 2019, while adoption by single people received stronger backing, at 61.5%. By 2026, support had reached 55.2% for adoption by same-sex couples and 55.8% for adoption by single individuals. Recognition of children of same-sex couples was supported by 58.4% of Italians in 2024, including the adoption of a partner’s child and recognition of children born abroad through heterologous assisted reproduction or surrogacy. In 2026, 56.9% continued to support the legal recognition of children of same-sex couples.
Overall, the Eurispes figures point to a high and generally increasing level of public support for the legal recognition of same-sex couples and families in Italy, although the evolution differs somewhat depending on the specific right under consideration.
Legality of same-sex sexual activity in Italy Same-sex sexual activity has been legal nationwide since 1890. The age of consent is 14 years old, regardless of gender and sexual orientation.
Italy is among the few European nations to have had an equal age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual acts ever since before the 20th century. The only nations in which there has been an equal age of consent for longer than Italy are Turkey (which equalized it in 1858) and the microstates of San Marino (which equalized it in 1864), Monaco (which equalized it in 1793) and Andorra (which equalized it in 1791). Meanwhile, in nearly every other European country, laws either setting a higher age of consent for homosexual acts or banning them altogether remained in force until the 20th century and sometimes even until the early 21st century, although they were not always actively enforced.
History
Italian unification in 1861 brought together a number of States, almost all of whom abolished punishment for private, non-commercial homosexual acts between consenting adults as a result of the Napoleonic Code. However, of the Penal Code promulgated in 1859 by Victor Emmanuel II of the Kingdom of Sardinia still punished consensual homosexual acts under Article 425, which read:
With unification, the former Kingdom of Sardinia extended its own criminalizing legislation to the rest of the newly born Kingdom of Italy, with some exceptions: in the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Penal Code of 1853 promulgated by Leopold II (which did not criminalize same-sex activities) remained in force, and the same happens in Sicily (as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, since 1819) and in Naples (as the Kingdom of Naples, since 1810). In addition, some Articles of the Sardinian Penal Code (including those dealing with homosexuality) were not extended to the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
This bizarre situation, where homosexuality was illegal in one part of the kingdom, but legal in another, was only reconciled in 1889, with the promulgation of the Zanardelli Code which abolished all differences in treatment between homosexual and heterosexual acts across the entire territory of Italy. This Penal Code became effective in 1890, and there have since been no laws against private, consensual homosexual relations between people over the age of consent.
In the 1920s, fascist MP Alfredo Rocco was tasked by the government of Benito Mussolini to develop a new Penal Code which would have replaced the 1889 one.
A first draft of the Code, published by Rocco in 1927, included a provision criminalizing homosexual acts, which read:
When Rocco eventually introduced the new Penal Code before Parliament, he decided not to include said Article, claiming that "in Italy, the abominable vice is not present to such an extent that the criminal law should concern itself with it".
As such, the final version of the Rocco Code, which became law in 1931, had no mention of same-sex intercourse. According to fascist doctrine, repression of certain sexual practices was a matter for moral authorities moreso than for the State. Nonetheless, those who displayed their homosexuality in public were targeted by the fascist police, and subject to extrajudicial punishments such as public admonition and exile; gay people were persecuted in the later years of the regime of Benito Mussolini, and under the Italian Social Republic of 1943–45.
The arrangements of the Rocco Code, namely, the principle that homosexual conduct is an issue of morality and religion, and not criminal sanctions by the State, have remained in place over subsequent decades. In the early 1960s, three bills aiming at re-criminalising gay sex were introduced, but none of them were ever even put up to a vote, due to lack of support from the Christian Democratic majority.
Recognition of same-sex relationships
At present, while same-sex couples cannot marry, they can access civil unions, enacted in 2016, which provide all of the rights, benefits and obligations of marriage except for joint adoption rights. These benefits include, amongst others, shared property, social security, inheritance and pension.
Since the 2005 regional elections, many Italian regions governed by centre-left coalitions have passed resolutions in support of French-style PACS (civil unions), including Tuscany, Umbria, Sicily, Campania, Marche, Veneto, Apulia, Lazio, Liguria, Abruzzo and Emilia-Romagna. Lombardy, led by the centre-right House of Freedoms, officially declared their opposition to any recognition of same-sex relationships. All these actions, however, are merely symbolic as regions do not have legislative power on the matter.
Although several bills on civil unions or the recognition of rights to unregistered couples had been introduced into the Parliament since 1996, none had ever been approved, owing to the strong opposition of socially conservative members of Parliament from both coalitions. On 8 February 2007, the Government led by Romano Prodi introduced a bill which would have granted rights in the areas of labour law, inheritance, taxation and health care to same-sex and opposite-sex unregistered partnerships. However, Parliament was dissolved before the draft law could be put up to a vote, and was ultimately shelved when the next election resulted in a conservative majority.
In 2010, the Constitutional Court () issued a landmark ruling which recognized same-sex couples as a "legitimate social formation, similar to, and deserving homogeneous treatment of, marriage". Since that ruling, the Supreme Court of Cassation (, the supreme and last revision court in most matters) remanded a decision by a Justice of the Peace who had rejected a residence permit to an Algerian citizen, married in Spain to a Spaniard of the same sex. The Court stated that the (police office, where residence permits are issued) should deliver a residence permit to a foreigner married with an Italian citizen of his same sex, and cited the ruling.
On 21 July 2015, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Oliari v. Italy that Italy's lack of any sort of recognition for same-sex partnership was a violation of international human rights.