REAL ESTATE | The Council of State on Demolition, Reconstruction and Building Renovation

On 4 November 2025, the Italian highest administrative court, the Council of State, issued its judgment No. 8542/2025 on the correct legal classification of demolition and reconstruction works under Article 3.1(d) of Presidential Decree No. 380 of 6 June 2001. As a general rule, such interventions may be carried out through a certified notice of commencement of activity (SCIA), pursuant to Article 23.1-bis of the same Decree.

In this context, the Court held that renovation work involving demolition and reconstruction (so-called “demo-reconstruction”) must concern a single, unified pre-existing building and must be executed with temporal continuity between demolition and reconstruction. Moreover, the intervention must remain urbanistically neutral, neither increasing the development load nor producing a substantial transformation of the territory. Consequently, it is not permissible to qualify as a renovation any operation involving the merging of volumes, the creation of a new building structure, or major functional changes, even in the absence of a volumetric increase. In such cases, Article 10.1(c) of the same Decree applies, requiring the issuance of a full building permit.

Newsletter n. 112 – November 2025