Italy Investor Visa Lawyer

The portal is open to applicants directly, and some people file alone. The difficulty is not the form: it is the documentation of the origin and transferability of the funds, which the Committee’s anti-money-laundering members read first, and the sequence of deadlines afterwards (thirty days to complete a file, six months to use the certificate, eight working days to apply for the permit, three months to invest). A lawyer admitted in Italy is required only if a refusal has to be challenged in court; for everything before that, the question is whether you want the file built by someone who has done it before.

Because no United States authority takes part in the procedure. The certificate is issued by an Italian Committee in Rome, the visa by an Italian consulate, the permit by an Italian Questura, all under Italian law. A US adviser is useful for your American tax position, which does not disappear when you move; we work alongside your CPA on that and do not pretend the two sides are one job.

We do not publish a flat figure for investor visa files because the work varies with the route, the family and the target. We quote in writing after the first written assessment, and the figure in the engagement letter is the figure you pay. What the State charges is €242.46 for the first two years; the investment itself is yours and is made after the visa is granted.

Yes. Where the Committee’s documentation calls for a report by an independent professional on the origin and availability of the funds, the firm can prepare and sign it. The report is drawn up on the basis of the documents you provide and of the anti-money-laundering checks already carried out by your bank, and it is one of the pieces we build the file around rather than an afterthought. We tell you at the first assessment whether your route requires it and what we will need from you to sign it.

A two-year Italian residence permit for investors, renewable for three years, with no minimum stay to keep it for those first five years; the right to live in Italy if you choose to; and, like any Italian residence permit, visa-free travel in the Schengen area for up to 90 days in any 180. After five years of continuous legal residence you can apply for the EU long-term residence permit, which is what most people mean by permanent residency. It does not give you Italian citizenship: Italy has no citizenship by investment, and naturalisation by residence is a separate, longer procedure. If your family has Italian ancestry, citizenship by descent may be a different and better route, and we say so when it is.

At the Questura of the municipality you indicate in the application. Unless your plans point elsewhere, we indicate Verona, where the firm is based and where the permit procedure is handled by an office we deal with regularly. This does not bind you: once the permit is issued you may live anywhere in Italy, and, for the first five years, you are not required to live in Italy at all to keep it.

Yes. Spouse, dependent children and dependent parents enter under the family reunification provisions of the immigration act, by reference from article 26-bis. We prepare their applications together with yours and tell you which of the ordinary family requirements apply.

The legal deadlines are thirty days for the Committee, six months’ validity of the certificate, eight working days to apply for the permit after entry and three months to invest. Nobody publishes measured statistics on the total elapsed time, and we will not invent one; in our experience the consular appointment and the opening of the Italian bank account set the real pace.