Rishta in Italy

What a Pakistani family in Italy should settle first

None of this is immigration or legal advice and it does not replace the Sportello Unico per l’Immigrazione, the comune or an Italian lawyer. Figures change every January with the social allowance. Confirm anything you intend to rely on. What follows is what actually decides how an Italian rishta works.

One hundred and seventy-one thousand, and the number that should change your search

At 1 January 2025 there were 171,179 Pakistani citizens resident in Italy. The distribution matters more than the total. Lombardy held 48,193 of them, 28.2 per cent of the whole community. Then Emilia-Romagna with 29,691, Tuscany with 13,933, Campania with 9,773, Piedmont with 9,557, Veneto with 9,517 and Lazio with 9,440.

Now the figure almost nobody quotes. Of those 48,193 in Lombardy, 31,678 were men and 16,515 were women. Close to two Pakistani men for every Pakistani woman, in the region that holds more than a quarter of Pakistani Italy.

Read what that means honestly, because it is the difference between a search that works and one that drags on for two years. A family with a son in Milan or Brescia is competing in a pool where the imbalance is against them, and should expect to widen early — to Emilia-Romagna, to the other Italian cities, and above all back to Pakistan. A family with a daughter settled in Lombardy is in the opposite position and can afford to be particular. Neither of those is a judgement about anybody. It is counting, and counting is cheaper than hoping.

The income figure is the social allowance plus fifty per cent each, and it moved in January

Italy does not publish a flat threshold for family reunification. It ties the figure to the assegno sociale, the social allowance, and adds half of it again for every family member you want to bring.

For 2026 the assegno sociale is 546.24 euros a month paid over thirteen instalments, which is 7,101.12 euros a year. Applying the rule to that figure gives, in round terms: about 10,650 euros a year to bring one family member, about 14,200 for two, about 17,750 for three, about 21,300 for four, and roughly 3,550 more for each additional person. There is a special rule where two or more children under fourteen are coming and no other adult family member is involved, in which case the threshold is twice the social allowance.

Two warnings. First, almost every guide and table online still works from the 2025 allowance of 7,002.97 euros a year, so the numbers you will be quoted by a relative or an agent are slightly low. Ask the Sportello Unico for the current figure in writing. Second, the permit matters as much as the income: you need either an EU long-term residence permit, or a permit of at least one year for employed work, self-employed work, international protection, family reasons, study or research. Holders of refugee status or subsidiary protection are not required to meet the income and housing requirements at all.

The certificate most families forget: idoneità alloggiativa

This is where Italian applications die, and it has nothing to do with how much anyone earns.

Alongside the income you must produce a certificato di idoneità alloggiativa, a housing suitability certificate issued by the comune where you live. It states how many people may lawfully live in that dwelling and confirms that the dwelling meets hygiene, sanitary and habitability standards. It has an expiry date, so it must be current when the application goes in.

Think about what that means for the very common Italian arrangement where three or four single men share a flat near the factory to save money. That flat will not certify for a wife, and no salary fixes it. The man who wants to marry has to move first, sign a lease in his own name, register his residence, and then get the certificate. That is months of work and it cannot be compressed. If a proposal comes from a man in shared accommodation, the kind question is what his plan and his timeline for a family flat actually are — and to be sceptical of any answer without a date in it.

The route itself runs from the Sportello Unico per l’Immigrazione at the Prefettura, which issues the nulla osta, to the Italian mission in Pakistan, which issues the visa.

Italy has signed fourteen agreements with religions since 1984, and none with Islam

This is the fact that surprises Pakistani families most, and it has a direct consequence for a wedding.

Under Article 8 of the Italian Constitution the state concludes agreements, intese, with individual religious confessions. Fourteen have been signed since 1984: the Waldensian Table in 1984, the Assemblies of God and the Adventists in 1988, the Union of Jewish Communities in 1989, the Baptists and the Lutherans in 1995, then the Orthodox Archdiocese, the Apostolic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Buddhist Union and the Hindu Union in 2012, Soka Gakkai in 2016, the Church of England in 2021, and the Romanian Orthodox Diocese by a law of 8 July 2026.

None with Islam. The closest it came was the Patto nazionale signed at the Interior Ministry on 1 February 2017 by nine representatives of Islamic associations, whose sixth point committed the signatories to creating the preliminary conditions for negotiations towards an intesa under Article 8. Those negotiations never began.

What follows from that, practically. A marriage celebrated by an imam in Italy does not carry automatic civil effects, in the way a Waldensian or Jewish religious marriage does. There is no register of recognised Muslim ministers of religion who can serve as chaplains in hospitals, prisons or barracks. Islamic associations are excluded from the otto per mille tax allocation. Places of worship are governed by municipal rules, which is why a mosque project can be stopped by a change of local administration. And Islamic religious teaching in state schools sits outside the concordat framework.

Be clear about what this is not. Freedom of worship is guaranteed by Article 19 of the Constitution and is not in question. The missing intesa is a gap in legal machinery, not a restriction on belief. But if you are planning a wedding in Italy, that gap is the whole story.

A nikah in Pakistan and a nikah in Italy are not the same thing in law

Follow this carefully, because the distinction decides which country you should marry in.

A marriage contracted abroad is not treated as ineffective in Italy merely because it is an Islamic marriage. The settled position in the Italian courts is that such a marriage produces effects here provided it followed the form required by the law of the place where it was celebrated and the parties met the requirements of status and capacity — age, mental capacity, no subsisting prior marriage, no prohibited relationship. Its effects stand until an Italian court annuls it. Transcription into the Italian registers is declaratory rather than constitutive, which is to say it records the marriage rather than creating it; only a Catholic concordat marriage requires transcription for validity. Public order remains an exception a court can invoke.

So a nikah properly conducted in Pakistan, with the nikah nama and the NADRA registration in order, travels into Italian law. A nikah conducted in a Milan or Rome mosque does not, because there is no intesa to give it civil effect. For a couple marrying in Italy the civil ceremony at the comune is the marriage; the religious ceremony sits alongside it and carries no legal weight of its own.

Practical advice in one line: marry in Pakistan and get the papers right, or marry at the comune and hold the nikah separately. What you must not do is hold a mosque nikah in Italy and assume a marriage exists, because the person who discovers otherwise is always the wife.

Three cities, seven regions, and where Italy widens to

We carry three Italian city pages but the community sits across at least seven regions, so the city field is less useful here than almost anywhere else on this site. Leave it blank. Milan and Brescia are fifty minutes apart on the train and are effectively one pool; Rome is three hours south of Milan by fast train and is a separate world with a fifth of the numbers. Emilia-Romagna, with nearly thirty thousand Pakistani residents and no page of its own yet, is the gap a Lombardy family should ask us about.

Outward, Italy is well placed. Barcelona and Madrid are on the same southern arc, Paris is a night train away, Munich is over the Brenner, and Athens is a ferry and a drive. Our pages for each set out their own rules, which differ from Italy’s considerably — Spain asks for one year of residence where Italy asks for one year of permit, and Germany asks a wife for a language certificate where Italy asks for none.

And the most common search made from Italy, by a wide margin and for the reasons set out at the top of this page, is straight back to Pakistan.