Land register: tavolare or conservatoria?

Enter the name of a municipality in Friuli Venezia Giulia – in Italian, German or Slovenian – and the tool tells you which register records the ownership of property there: the land register (tavolare, or libro fondiario), inherited from the Austrian tradition, or the property registry (conservatoria dei registri immobiliari), as in the rest of Italy. It also tells you which office to apply to, what to ask for first, and whether national transaction statistics count that municipality.

It does not read the entry for your property and does not say who owns it: for that you need a land register extract, or a property registry search together with a cadastral search.

Under the land register, a property right is acquired by entry in the register: until the land register decree has been issued, the transfer of ownership is not complete. Under the property registry, the contract itself transfers ownership, and registration of the deed makes it effective against third parties. These are two different logics, with different timings and different documents, and anyone buying or selling across the two systems needs to know which one applies before they start.

A reader from Austria, Germany or South Tyrol will recognise the first system as the Grundbuch; a reader from Slovenia, as the zemljiška knjiga. A reader used to English conveyancing should note that in neither system does the cadastre prove title: the Italian cadastre is a tax record.

The land register is not confined to Trieste: in the region it covers the provinces of Trieste and Gorizia and part of the province of Udine, and outside the region Trentino-Alto Adige and some municipalities in the Veneto and Lombardy. In some municipalities it applies to part of the territory only: the tool says so.