Italy Address Standard

An Italian address ends with a two-letter code: 20133 MILANO MI. The MI is the province, and unlike the region it is part of the postal address. The same two letters are the suffix of the province's ISO 3166-2 code (IT-MI), and they are what an SAP region field for Italy conventionally holds. Most Italian address problems come from losing that code or from putting it in the wrong field.

This article describes the Italian address format, how CDQ represents it in the CDQ address model, how the province reaches the SAP fields, how San Marino, the Vatican, Livigno and Campione d'Italia are handled, and which reference data CDQ maintains for Italy. It is the reference for anyone mapping Italian business partner data into CDQ, or consuming curated Italian addresses from CDQ.

In this article, you will understand:

• How an Italian address is structured, and which line carries the building, the floor and the unit
• Which administrative levels are written on an address, and why the province is one of them
• How each Italian level maps to a concept in the CDQ address model, and which SAP field it reaches
• Why the province code belongs in the second administrative level, and not in the region
• Why San Marino and the Vatican are separate countries while Livigno and Campione d'Italia stay Italian
• Which reference data CDQ maintains for Italy, and where it is incomplete

Available in:

• CDQ Wiki: business partner metadata for Italy: browse the published Italian metadata

An Italian address has the ordinary European shape: a street type and name, a number after it, a post code and a place. Most of it needs no special handling.

What is specific to Italy is narrower, and it is where integrations actually go wrong:

Italy has two levels of administrative area below the country, and below them the municipalities and the places inside them. The province and the municipality are written on an address, and the region is not.

The second level has several names because its reform differs by region. Most of Italy has provinces and, around the largest cities, metropolitan cities. Sicily has free municipal consortia, Friuli-Venezia Giulia has regional decentralisation entities, and Trentino-Alto Adige consists of the two autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano. They all occupy the same level, and every one of them has its two-letter code. Sardinia's units have been reorganised several times, so an older Sardinian code can still appear in source data.

The Aosta Valley is the exception. It has no province, because the region performs that role itself, but its addresses carry the code AO like any other province.

Esempio S.r.l.
Scala B Piano 3 Interno 7
Viale Romagna 12
20133 MILANO MI

The recipient comes first. An optional line for the building follows, then the street line with the street type first and the number after the name, never before it. The last line holds the post code, the municipality and the province code. The region is never written. A hamlet goes on a line of its own above the post code line when the recipient is there rather than in the main town.

Italian addresses keep the position inside the building off the street line. The words are few:

So Scala B Piano 3 Interno 7 reads: staircase B, third floor, unit 7.

The number follows the street name. It can carry a suffix, written as a letter, a slash or a Latin word: 12A, 12/A, 12 bis. The suffix is part of the number and identifies a different entrance.

In Genoa and Florence there are two independent series on the same street. Black numbers mark residential entrances and offices, and red numbers mark shops and workshops, written 12r, 12 R or 12 rosso. 12 and 12r can be some distance apart.

The CAP (codice di avviamento postale) is five digits. The first two broadly follow the province, but the code is a sorting code and not an administrative one, so it is not a reliable way to derive the province. In the largest cities each street or block has its own code, and the code ending in 100 (20100 Milano, 00100 Roma) is a generic code that does not identify a delivery area.

The CDQ address model has two parallel hierarchies. Administrative areas represent the political containers, typed REGION and COUNTY. Localities represent the places themselves, typed CITY, DISTRICT, QUARTER or BLOCK. Streets are held as thoroughfares with the number in its own field, and the position inside the building as typed premises.

Italy maps as follows:

Italy does not use the SAP house number supplement, HOUSE_NUM2, which CDQ fills only for the Iberian and Latin American convention. The unit goes to the room number and the floor to the floor field.

The two-letter code on an Italian address is the province. It is tempting to put it in the region field, because it is the only administrative value on the address and because many SAP systems hold it there, but the region of MI is Lombardia (IT-25), and the two are different facts.

CDQ standardises the province against reference data when it arrives as administrative area level 2, or as the administrative area typed COUNTY: MI, Milano and Milan all resolve to IT-MI, and the canonical name and the two-letter code are written back. A two-letter code supplied as the region is looked up among the 20 regions, where it is not found. It is kept as supplied and not standardised.

CDQ delivers the region and the province with their ISO 3166-2 codes. An SAP system does not validate against ISO: it validates the region field against its own region key table, T005S, which is part of a customer's configuration. That key exists for tax and jurisdiction purposes, which is why its level differs from one country to the next.

The region key is customer-specific configuration, so this standard does not define one: a T005S is specific to a customer and to a client, and no single value would be correct everywhere. What this standard fixes is the ISO 3166-2 code. The mapping from it to the key your system expects is yours to maintain.

For Italy the key your configuration holds is conventionally the province code, the two letters on the last line of the address, so it sits one level below the region. For Italy that mapping is unusually direct: the ISO code of the province is IT- followed by those two letters, and CDQ delivers the two letters on their own as the county code. The region has no key of its own to map to.

Treat the ISO code as the value CDQ guarantees and the SAP key as a mapping you own. Confirm which level your configuration uses before deciding which CDQ field feeds it.

San Marino and the Vatican City are independent states inside Italy, served through the Italian postal network. Their post codes look Italian: 47890 to 47899 for San Marino, 00120 for the Vatican. They are nonetheless separate countries, SM and VA, and an address there is an SM or VA address. San Marino is held with its nine municipalities (castelli, SM-01 to SM-09) as its regions.

Livigno (province of Sondrio) and Campione d'Italia (province of Como) are Italian municipalities with a special tax status. Both are outside the EU VAT area, and Livigno is also outside the EU customs territory. That is a property of the place and not of the address: their addresses stay country IT with their province, and nothing about the address changes.

Viale Romagna 12, Piano 4, Interno 8, 20133 Milano MI, in the CDQ address model:

In the SAP fields, 12 is the house number, 4 the floor, 8 the room number, Milano the county with the county code MI, and Lombardia the region.

20 entries, each carrying its ISO 3166-2 code and its Italian name, and most of them also English, German, French and Chinese names. The ISO code of an Italian region is numeric.

106 entries, held as administrative area level 2 and each linked to its region. The code is the ISO code, IT- followed by the two letters written on the address. The Aosta Valley has no entry here, because it has no province.

The 106 are spread unevenly: Lombardy has twelve, Tuscany ten, and Trentino-Alto Adige, Umbria, Molise and Basilicata two each.

A handful of entries: the post office box (Casella postale, CP), one street word (Vicolo, Vic.) and one institution word. The Italian street and premises vocabulary is not yet published: see Current limitations.

Five digits. Separators between the digits are tolerated by the published format. San Marino has its own published format, 4789 followed by one digit.

These are the gaps worth knowing about before designing an integration.

An Italian address writes the street type first and the number after the name, keeps the building, the floor and the unit on a line of their own, and ends with the post code, the municipality and the two-letter province code. The province is part of the postal address; the region is not.

CDQ places the region in administrative area level 1 and the province in level 2, with the two letters as the county code, which is also the value an SAP region field for Italy conventionally holds. The municipality is locality level 1 and a hamlet locality level 2. The floor goes to the floor field and the unit to the room number; Italy does not use the house number supplement. San Marino and the Vatican are their own countries despite Italian-looking post codes, while Livigno and Campione d'Italia stay Italian and carry their tax status as a property of the place.

The 20 regions and the 106 provinces are maintained as CDQ reference data. The street and premises vocabulary is where the current coverage is weakest.

• Business partner metadata for Italy
• Spain Address Standard
• France Address Standard
• Germany Address Standard

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