Two respected sources disagree about Italy more than about any other country on this site, and that disagreement is worth more to you than either number on its own. Equaldex, the index behind the 6.6 above, puts Italy at 66 out of 100 — a Legal Index of 74 and a Public Opinion Index of 59. ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Map, the specialist annual audit of European law and policy, puts Italy at 24%, 36th of 49 countries, unchanged from 2025.

Both are measuring honestly; they are measuring different things. Equaldex gives heavy weight to whether homosexuality is legal at all and whether some form of partnership exists — Italy passes both — and half its score is what Italians actually think, which is fairly accepting. ILGA asks whether specific protections exist, one by one, and Italy fails most of them. Read together they say something a single number can't: Italian society is considerably more accepting than Italian law.

What the law does and doesn't do: civil unions have been recognised since 2016, but there is no marriage equality and no joint adoption. Parenthood for same-sex couples is not automatically recognised — the interior ministry instructed mayors to stop registering the births of children conceived abroad through assisted reproduction, which has meant existing certificates being challenged and one parent removed from their own child's papers. In 2024 the long-standing surrogacy ban was extended to make it a crime for Italians to become parents by surrogacy in another country, with increased penalties. Legal gender recognition for trans people remains bureaucratic and medicalised. The bill that would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to hate-crime law was blocked in the Senate in 2021 and has not returned.

The counterweight is the courts, not the parliament: in July 2025 the Constitutional Court ruled that the non-biological mother in a same-sex couple is entitled to parental leave. That is the pattern to watch — a government narrowing family recognition, and judges restoring parts of it case by case.

Italy is a functioning democracy but press freedom has declined. The EIU rates it as a 'flawed democracy'. Media ownership is concentrated, and self-censorship is documented. Institutions are independent but slow.

Italy ranks 79th globally on the WEF Gender Gap Index. The gender pay gap is significant, women are underrepresented in leadership, and over 60% of gynaecologists are conscientious objectors to abortion in some regions.

Italy has an independent judiciary, though the court system is notoriously slow. Corruption perceptions remain high relative to Northern European peers.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and Italy is one of those cases.

The figure on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour, and that review covers the 131 countries which hold trade preferences with the United States. Italy is not one of them, so it is never assessed. The obvious alternative doesn't help either: the ILO and UNICEF's global estimates, published in June 2025, are built on household surveys in 107 countries and leave out Europe and Northern America entirely — in their own words, "because of data limitations".

That absence is not the same as zero. The ILO's regional estimate puts around 2.3 million children aged 5 to 17 in child labour across Europe and Northern America, against under 1 per cent of children in high-income countries as a group. No national figure is published inside that. So the honest summary is that the record here is probably good and definitely unmeasured.