Abstract

In the first part, the article describes the Italian Constituent Assembly's debates concerning art. 29 of the Constitution but does not opt for a strictly originalist approach to the interpretation of the law. As a result the Author underlines that the Italian founding fathers did not intend to entrench a specific definition of "family", or to base it on the socalled natural law. On the contrary, the aim was to affirm the autonomy of the family as a social group against any statutory intervention, as Italy had already experienced under the Fascist regime. Therefore, in order to grant certainty to the constitutionally protected status of family members and to grant them a full development of the individual, the word "marriage" was included in the text of art. 29. In the second part of the article, the Author moves on to discuss whether a law granting same sex marriages or civil partnerships in Italy would be constitutional. In order to do so, the Author critically approaches the most common legal justifications usually put forward to undermine the legitimacy of such protection within the Italian constitutional system.