To buy a .it domain you must be a citizen or resident of the European Union, the EEA, Switzerland, Norway, San Marino, or Vatican City, and you must supply a tax identification number. That is the one genuine restriction, and it is the thing the first page of search results manages to be vague about.
Search for how to buy a .it domain and you will find registrar pages implying anyone can, a registry page that explains the naming syntax in detail without stating the eligibility rule up front, and a help article saying EU citizenship is required. They are describing the same rule from different angles, and the confusion costs people a failed registration and a refund request.
Table of contents
- The eligibility rule, stated plainly
- Naming rules and how registration works
- What to check before you pay
- Setting up DNS after the purchase
- Is a ccTLD the right call for an Italian market
- Where the site runs still matters
- How this fits the rest of the stack
- FAQ
The eligibility rule, stated plainly
Registro .it, operated by the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the Italian National Research Council in Pisa, restricts .it registration to registrants established in the EU, the EEA, Switzerland, Norway, San Marino, or Vatican City.
That covers citizens and residents of those territories, and companies or organisations legally established in them. It excludes a business or individual based only in, for example, the United States, the United Kingdom after its EU departure, Australia, or India.
Alongside eligibility, the registration records a tax identification number. For an Italian individual that is the codice fiscale, a sixteen-character code derived from name, date and place of birth. For an Italian company it is the partita IVA. For a registrant elsewhere in the eligible territory it is the equivalent national tax or VAT number.
If you are outside the eligible territory and want a .it, the standard route is a trustee or local-presence service offered by some registrars, where a third party holds the registration on your behalf under contract. It works, it is legitimate, and it has real trade-offs: an annual fee, and a registrant of record who is not you, which complicates a dispute or a transfer. Weigh that against a generic extension before committing.
Naming rules and how registration works
The registry does not sell to the public. You register through an accredited Registrar, of which there are many, both Italian and international. The registry maintains the database and enforces the rules; the registrar handles the transaction and the contact data.
The name itself must satisfy the registry’s syntax:
- Letters a to z, digits 0 to 9, and the hyphen, plus the non-ASCII characters listed in the registry’s technical guidelines for internationalised names.
- Between 3 and 63 characters.
- Must not begin or end with a hyphen.
- Must not begin with the sequence xn, which is reserved for the punycode encoding of internationalised names.
That last rule surprises people occasionally — a legitimate brand starting with those two letters cannot be registered as a plain .it name.
Registration is normally immediate once the contact data validates. Where it stalls, it is usually the tax code: a codice fiscale that does not match the name and birth details supplied will fail the registry’s check, and a foreign tax number entered in the wrong format will too.
What to check before you pay
Three things, in this order.
The renewal price. As with most ccTLDs, the advertised figure is frequently a first-year promotion and the renewal is higher, sometimes considerably. Find the renewal rate and multiply it by the years you expect to hold the name. That is the real cost.
The transfer policy. Moving a .it between registrars uses an authorisation code, and registrars differ in how readily they produce one and whether they charge for it. A registrar that makes leaving awkward is a registrar you will regret in three years.
Who is listed as registrant. This is the one that actually matters and the one people skim. Whoever is named in that field owns the domain. If an agency registers it for you and lists itself, you are renting your own brand. Insist that your company is the registrant even when someone else manages the DNS, and keep a copy of the registration confirmation somewhere that is not that agency’s inbox.
None of this is specific to .it, but a ccTLD with an eligibility rule and a trustee market attached has more ways for the registrant field to end up being somebody else.
Setting up DNS after the purchase
Buying the name gets you the right to publish records under it. Nothing resolves until you do.
Point the nameservers at your DNS host, then publish what you need:
- An A record at the root for your host’s address, or an ALIAS/ANAME record if the host gives you a hostname instead of an IP.
- A CNAME for www.
- MX records if the domain receives mail, with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC as TXT records alongside.
- Any TXT verification records a service asks for.
Choose one canonical hostname and redirect the other permanently to it. Serving the site at both the root and the www form with no redirect splits your search presence and produces two versions of every URL.
Then verify the certificate covers both names. A certificate issued only for the root does not cover the www subdomain, and the resulting browser warning is a worse first impression than a 404. Most platforms handle this automatically when both hostnames are added to the project; the failure mode is adding one and assuming the other came along.
Is a ccTLD the right call for an Italian market
A .it is a strong signal that a site is for an Italian audience, and Italian users recognise and trust it. If Italy is your market, it is the natural choice.
The cost is that the signal is exclusive. A .it does not help you in France or Germany, and running one ccTLD per market means one registration, one renewal, one certificate, one DNS zone, and one set of eligibility rules per country. That overhead is real and it compounds.
For a business serving several European markets, a generic domain with country subfolders and hreflang annotations is usually simpler to operate and consolidates authority in one place rather than splitting it across several domains that each have to earn their own.
A common middle path is to register the .it defensively — so nobody else has your brand on it — point it at the main site with a redirect, and revisit the decision if the Italian market grows enough to justify a dedicated site. That costs one registration fee a year and keeps the option open.
Where the site runs still matters
The extension is a signal; the experience is what the visitor gets. An Italian customer loading a site from a server several thousand kilometres away pays the round-trip on every request, and that shows up in bounce rate long before it shows up in a ranking report.
This is a hosting decision rather than a domain one, and it is the more consequential of the two. Serving European visitors from Europe, with sensible caching and images that are not larger than they need to be, does more for how the site performs in an Italian search result than the two letters after the dot.
It is also the part with an ongoing cost, which is worth knowing before the domain is registered rather than after.
How this fits the rest of the stack
The domain is an annual fee and a set of records; the site behind it is the part with a monthly number attached. Once the .it exists, what matters is a host that serves it quickly to the audience it was bought for, and a certificate that covers every hostname a visitor might type. Custom domains and certificates on RunxBuild are configured per project, so adding a ccTLD to a running site is a DNS change. The RunxBuild hosting calculator shows the service, storage, and bandwidth together if you are still deciding what the site will be.
Useful related references:
- Buying a .be Domain: The Belgian Registry, and What Comes After
- How to Transfer a Domain Name Between Registrars Without Downtime
- Fully Qualified Domain Name: The Trailing Dot and Why It Matters
- Custom domains and certificates on RunxBuild
FAQ
Can a non-EU person buy a .it domain name?
Not directly. Registro .it restricts registration to citizens, residents, or organisations established in the EU, EEA, Switzerland, Norway, San Marino, or Vatican City. Registrants outside that territory typically use a trustee or local-presence service from a registrar, which works but adds an annual fee and puts a third party in the registrant field.
What is a codice fiscale and do I need one?
It is the Italian tax identification code, sixteen characters derived from your name and birth details, and it is what an Italian individual supplies at registration. An Italian company supplies its partita IVA instead. A registrant elsewhere in the eligible territory supplies their own national tax or VAT number.
Why was my .it registration rejected?
Most often the tax code did not validate against the name and details supplied, or the registrant does not meet the territorial eligibility rule. Less often it is the naming syntax: names must be 3 to 63 characters, cannot start or end with a hyphen, and cannot begin with the letters xn, which are reserved for encoded internationalised names.
Do I have to register through an Italian registrar?
No. Registro .it accredits registrars internationally, so you can register through a provider in your own country as long as you meet the eligibility rule. What matters more than the registrar’s location is its renewal pricing, its transfer policy, and whether it lists you rather than itself as the registrant.
Is a .it domain better than a .com for an Italian business?
For a business selling only in Italy, yes — it is a clear signal to both users and search engines. For a business serving several European markets, one generic domain with country subfolders and hreflang is usually easier to run than several ccTLDs, each with its own renewal, certificate, and eligibility paperwork.