Defamation in Italy: A Criminal Offence, Not Just a Civil Claim

Diffamazione is one of the most searched legal terms in Italy, and the first thing worth knowing, for a reader arriving from an English-speaking legal system, is the one that most changes how the rest of this page reads: in Italy, defaming someone is a crime. Art. 595 of the codice penale sits in Book Two, among offences against the person, not in the civil code alongside contracts and torts, and it carries reclusione, imprisonment, as a possible outcome, not only damages.

This page maps what the offence covers, how the penalty escalates depending on how the statement was made, why a Facebook post is treated the same way as a newspaper article, and how diffamazione differs from the much lighter wrong of insulting someone to their face. For the procedure and the deadline to act, see filing a querela for diffamazione, and for a wider comparative view of Italian defamation law see the Italy defamation laws overview.

Information verified on 20 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice for an individual situation.

What art. 595 c.p. actually punishes

The codice penale defines diffamazione in a single, dense sentence: whoever, outside the cases described in the preceding article (that is the article covering an offended person who is present, discussed further down), offends another person's reputation by communicating with more than one other person, is punished with reclusione up to one year or a fine up to 1.032 euro.

Two elements do the real work. First, the person being talked about must not be present when the statement is made. Second, the statement has to reach at least two other people; telling one other person is not enough. Reputation here means the standing a person enjoys among others, so the offence protects how someone is seen by their community, not only how they feel about themselves. A fourth comma raises the penalty further where the offence targets a political, administrative or judicial body; most disputes a reader is likely to face involve an individual target, so the rest of this page focuses on that.

The penalty ladder, and a worked example

The base offence is only the floor. Two aggravanti raise the ceiling depending on how the statement was made.

Take a concrete case. A customer posts a review of a small restaurant falsely claiming the owner covered up a failed health inspection that sent diners to hospital. That attributes a specific, checkable fact, clearing the second-comma bar, and because the review is visible to anyone who searches for the restaurant it also reaches an indeterminate audience, which is what the third comma targets. Where both aggravanti apply to the same statement, it is the third-comma range, reclusione from six months to three years or a fine of at least 516 euro, that frames the case, with the fatto determinato element weighed within it.

Diffamazione on Facebook and other social media

This is the section most readers came here for. The third-comma aggravante, col mezzo della stampa o con qualsiasi altro mezzo di pubblicità, was written decades before social media existed, but Italian courts, including the Corte di Cassazione, apply it to ordinary social media posts on a settled basis. The reasoning is about reach, not the platform's name: a post on a public or semi-public profile can reach an indeterminate or appreciable number of people, which is exactly what the aggravante targets.

The aggravante does not require the target to be named outright. If a post describes someone in enough detail that others can work out who is meant, identifiability is enough. A resident who posts in a public condominio Facebook group accusing «the woman in apartment 4» of stealing parcels, without a name, can still trigger the aggravante if the description lets other residents identify her.

Not every group chat qualifies, though. A message in a small, closed WhatsApp group of five family members is not automatically a mezzo di pubblicità, since it lacks the capacity to reach an indeterminate audience. It can still be diffamazione, because it reaches at least two people while the subject is absent, but the aggravated range turns on the group's actual reach, not its member count.

Diffamazione vs ingiuria: the line is who is in the room

The single most common source of confusion on this topic is the line between diffamazione and ingiuria. It comes down to one question: was the person you were talking about there when you said it?

Ingiuria, insulting someone to their face or in direct communication with them, used to be a crime under art. 594 c.p. D.Lgs. 15 gennaio 2016, n. 7 abrogated art. 594 outright and moved the conduct into a civil wrong instead. Offending someone's honour or decoro while they are present, or through a telegraphic, telephone, computer or telematic communication addressed to them, now carries a sanzione pecuniaria civile of 100 to 8.000 euro, rising to 200 to 12.000 euro where a specific fact is attributed or it happens before several people. That sanction is imposed by the civil court and paid to the Cassa delle ammende, alongside ordinary damages, in a civil, not criminal, courtroom.

Truth is not an automatic defence

Unlike the assumption many English-speaking readers bring to this topic, saying something true about someone is not, by itself, a defence to diffamazione. Art. 596 c.p. generally bars proving the truth or notoriety of what was attributed to the offended person. Three exceptions exist, but they open only where the offence consisted of attributing a fatto determinato, a specific alleged fact rather than a general insult: the offended person is a public official and the fact concerns their functions, a criminal proceeding over the attributed fact is already open against them, or the querelante formally asks the court to determine whether the fact is true.

The limit is easy to miss and it cuts the other way from what most readers assume. Where the words attributed no specific fact at all, none of the three exceptions is even reachable, so proof of truth is barred outright. Outside those situations, truth alone does not resolve a case, and the esimenti of cronaca and critica are the route that usually matters instead.

Two constitutionally grounded defences sit alongside art. 596: the diritto di cronaca, the right to report news, and the diritto di critica, the right to criticise, both tracing to art. 21 of the Constitution and both narrower than «I told the truth». Settled practice requires diligent verification of the facts, a genuine public interest, and continenza, language that stays proportionate to the point being made rather than gratuitously degrading. A harsh but substantiated review of a public figure's conduct in office differs from an accusation dressed up in language whose only real purpose is to humiliate.

Filing a complaint, and the civil route alongside it

Diffamazione does not prosecute itself. Art. 597 c.p. makes it punibile a querela della persona offesa: a public prosecutor cannot pursue it unless the offended person actively files a querela, and art. 124 c.p. gives them three months, tre mesi, from the day they learn of the fact, not from the day the statement was made. Three calendar months is not the same arithmetic as ninety days, since months run to different lengths, and Italian practice treats the two as distinct. The full mechanics, where to file, what the querela must contain, and what happens afterward, are on the querela filing page.

The criminal route does not close off the civil one. Art. 2043 c.c., Italy's general tort provision, lets the injured person claim damages independently, and in practice they often join the criminal proceeding directly as parte civile rather than filing two separate cases.

A pending reform, not yet law

Diffamazione a mezzo stampa has been the subject of reform proposals in Parliament for years, aimed mainly at removing imprisonment as a penalty for journalists. None has been enacted. What actually changed came from the Corte Costituzionale, not Parliament: judgment no. 150 of 2021 struck down the mandatory minimum prison sentence a separate 1948 press law imposed for aggravated press defamation, reasoning that forcing a judge to imprison a journalist chills the press's watchdog function. That judgment left art. 595, third comma, intact and constitutional: reclusione from six months to three years or a fine remains available at the judge's discretion. A claim that Italy has decriminalised press defamation is premature; as of this page's verification date, it has not.