Police search in Italy at home or at the office: what to do during and after

As a rule, a search is ordered by the public prosecutor through a reasoned warrant (decreto di perquisizione), stating what is being sought and where, and may be carried out by delegated judicial police officers such as the Guardia di Finanza (the financial police) or the Carabinieri (art. 247 of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure). When the operations begin, a copy of the warrant must be handed to the suspect, if present, and to whoever has control of the premises, with notice that they may be assisted by a person they trust, provided that person can be reached at once (art. 250).

Three things in the warrant deserve attention: the offence under investigation, the places listed and the items sought. They set the boundaries of the search, and will later show whether what was taken falls within them. In a home, a search may not begin before 7 a.m. or after 8 p.m., except in urgent cases ordered in writing (art. 251).

The judicial police may also search without a warrant, but only in limited cases, such as an offence caught in the act: they must then send the record to the prosecutor within forty-eight hours, and the prosecutor decides whether to validate the search within the following forty-eight hours (art. 352).

The first call is to a defence lawyer. When carrying out a search or seizure, the prosecutor asks the suspect, if present, whether they have a lawyer of their choice and, if not, appoints a duty lawyer; the lawyer is entitled to attend (art. 365). The operations do not stop to wait, which is why the lawyer should be called immediately.

• Do not obstruct the operations: those in charge may also search the people present, by reasoned order, and require that nobody leaves until the end (art. 250(3)).
• Do not discuss the facts: questioning of the suspect by the judicial police requires the lawyer to be present (art. 350(3)). Spontaneous statements cannot be used at trial, but they remain in the investigation file.
• Point out correspondence with your lawyer: communications between the suspect and their defence lawyer may not be taken, unless they are themselves evidence of the offence (art. 103(6-bis)).
• Read the record before signing it, ask for your remarks to be noted and keep a copy: the person whose property is seized is entitled to a copy of the seizure record (art. 258(3)).

The law also allows computer systems to be searched, with measures that preserve the original data and prevent any alteration (art. 247(1-bis)). In practice, investigators take the phone or computer away, or make a «forensic copy», a complete certified duplicate of the data.

On this point the Court of Cassation is now firm. A seizure that leads to taking all the data on a device indiscriminately, with no selection criteria, breaches the principle of proportionality: the warrant must explain why such a wide seizure is needed or state which information is sought, by which criteria and over what period, and provide for the return of irrelevant data. On that ground the Court quashed the seizure of a mobile phone without remitting the case and ordered its return (Court of Cassation, Criminal Section VI, 19 January 2026, filed 25 February 2026, no. 7520).

For the person searched, this means the review is not only about whether the alleged offence exists: the breadth of the data taken can be challenged too, and on a phone that includes messages, photographs, locations and other people’s data.

At a business, a search involves different people: the legal representative, the managers under investigation, employees, the IT systems. It helps to settle in advance who receives the investigators, who calls the defence lawyer and which IT manager assists them in accessing the servers, so that the copy of the data is targeted and the business can keep running.

A further question arises afterwards: who may ask for review. The Joint Sections of the Court of Cassation have held that the suspect may do so if they show a concrete and present interest linked to the effects of lifting the seizure on their own position (Court of Cassation, Joint Criminal Sections, filed 27 February 2026, no. 7983). In the same judgment they recalled that a defendant who challenges, in their own name, the seizure of company assets must show an interest relating to their personal position: so when the assets belong to the business, it should be assessed at once whether the application must be made by the company, through its legal representative.

There are two routes, and the time limits are short.

1. If something was seized, the suspect, the person from whom it was taken and whoever would be entitled to its return may ask for review, including on the merits (art. 257). The application must be filed within ten days of the seizure or of learning about it, and is decided by a panel of the court of the provincial capital (art. 324). Review does not suspend the seizure.
2. If nothing was seized, an objection to the prosecutor’s search warrant may be lodged with the judge within ten days, on pain of forfeiture; the judge upholds it if the search was ordered outside the cases provided by law (art. 252-bis). This remedy was introduced in 2022, called for by the European Court of Human Rights in several judgments starting with Brazzi v. Italy in 2018, as the Joint Sections recall in their 2026 judgment.

Ten days go quickly: within that time the available documents must be obtained, the warrant assessed and the grounds written. Where money is frozen as well as documents, the rules are those of the preventive seizure (sequestro preventivo), which we discuss in our article on the preventive seizure of a bank account.

Consider a Milan company whose finance director is under investigation for using invoices for non-existent transactions. At seven in the morning the Guardia di Finanza arrives at the offices and at his home with a warrant to search for accounting records and to seize «any computer device». They take the company laptop, his personal phone and a complete copy of the server.

The questions for the next ten days are practical: does the warrant set a period and search criteria for the data? Was the personal phone really needed, or would a targeted selection have done? Who should challenge the copy of the server, the manager or the company? The answers shape the review and often make it possible to recover what the investigation does not need. Our criminal defence work in Milan includes attending the search itself, in Italian or English.