Patent Drawings in Italy: 8 Essential Article 22 Rules

Italy is where competent drawing sets go wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with draughtsmanship. The rules governing patent drawings in Italy are not spread across a long itemised regulation like the American ones, nor compressed into a single sentence like Sweden’s. They sit in one article — Article 22 of the implementing regulation to the Industrial Property Code. It carries two requirements most foreign practitioners have never met: an outright exclusion of colour with no petition route, and a rule about reproduction processes that bars photographic copies while expressly permitting Xerox ones. Add a national route shut for decades and reopened in 2020 behind a hard cut-off, and this filing rewards reading the text.

Why Patent Drawings in Italy Answer to Article 22

The national office is the Ufficio Italiano Brevetti e Marchi (UIBM), which sits inside the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy in Rome. Unlike the USPTO, it has never run a dedicated draughtsperson corps whose job is to issue drawing objections. That absence shapes everything about how figure defects surface in Italy.

The binding text is Article 22 of Ministerial Decree 13 January 2010 no. 33, the implementing regulation to the Industrial Property Code (Legislative Decree 30/2005). One article, a few sentences, and it is unusually prescriptive about physical media for a rule written in 2010.

You also do not have to file in Rome. Italian practice lets you deposit an application through any Chamber of Commerce — a genuinely federal intake system with no equivalent in most of Europe — or through UIBM’s e-filing portal, which is faster and now the normal route.

The consequence of there being no drawings examiner is not leniency for patent drawings in Italy. It is delay. A set that quietly breaches Article 22 is unlikely to be bounced at deposit; the problem reappears either inside a substantive objection or, worse, years later when somebody argues about what your figures actually disclosed. Our patent drawing service treats Article 22 as a deposit-stage checklist for exactly that reason.

Rule 1: A4, One Side of the Sheet, 2.5 cm on Every Margin

Article 22 requires drawings on strong, white, non-glossy paper in A4 format (29.7 × 21 cm), using one side of the sheet only — never front-and-back — with margins of at least 2.5 cm on all four sides.

Three traps catch foreign filers here, and all three are dimensional rather than artistic. The first is the single-sided rule: duplex printing is a formality breach in its own right, independent of anything drawn on the page. The second is that 2.5 cm applies uniformly to all four edges. There is no narrower bottom margin, no wider left binding margin, and no millimetre table of the kind France and Poland publish.

The third is the simplest to get wrong. A US set built to 37 CFR 1.84(f)–(g) on 8.5 × 11 inch sheets does not become compliant by being scaled to A4, because the American margin scheme is not the Italian one. Regenerate the sheets; do not rescale them.

• Italy: A4, single-sided, ≥ 2.5 cm on all four sides.
• USPTO: 21.0 × 29.7 cm or 21.6 × 27.9 cm, with sight margins set by 37 CFR 1.84(g).
• Sweden: A4 and no stated margins at all — practice imports PCT Rule 11.6.

If you are maintaining one master set for several offices and want patent drawings in Italy to come out of it unchanged, build to PCT drawing requirements and widen the margins to 2.5 cm. That single set clears Italy, and Rule 11 is stricter than Article 22 on nearly every other axis.

Rule 2: Black Ink, With Any Colour Expressly Excluded

Article 22 requires the drawings to be executed according to the rules of the art — by hand is permitted — and traced with indelible black ink or printed, con esclusione di qualsiasi colore: excluding any colour.

Read that phrasing carefully, because it is stronger than the usual formulation. Most offices require dark lines on a light background, which regulates contrast. Article 22 goes further and excludes colour as such. Greyscale tonal rendering is on equally thin ice: the provision contemplates lines and printed characters, not photographic tone.

In practice UIBM is known to accept colour or greyscale on an informal basis, particularly through e-filing, which is why so many practitioners believe patent drawings in Italy may be filed in colour. Do not build a strategy on that. An informal tolerance is not a right, it creates no estoppel, and it is worth nothing at all in a later validity dispute where the question is what the deposited figures lawfully disclosed.

What makes this genuinely awkward is that Italy is now out of step with the offices an applicant deals with in the same fortnight:

• The EPO has accepted colour and greyscale in electronically filed applications since 1 October 2025.
• The USPTO allows colour in a utility application on a granted petition under 37 CFR 1.84(a)(2), with the fee set by 37 CFR 1.17(h).
• Italy has no petition, no fee and no discretionary route — the same hard position as France, and as Sweden.
• Design registrations are the exception: where colour is a claimed characteristic of the design, the reproduction must be executed in the colours claimed.

That design carve-out is worth holding against the American position, because the two systems pull in opposite directions. Under 37 CFR 1.152 a US design drawing must itself comply with 37 CFR 1.84, so the colour petition route is the only way colour enters a design application there — and photographs and ink drawings may not be combined in one application. Italy inverts it: for a design whose colour is claimed, reproducing the colour is not a concession you petition for but a requirement. The same product can therefore need a black-line US design set and a colour Italian one.

So one invention can need a petitioned colour set for the USPTO, a colour set for the EPO, and a pure black-line set for UIBM. Build the black-line set first — it is the only one that converts cleanly in every direction. We compare the regimes in colour patent drawings and set out the identical French bar in patent drawings in France.

Rule 3: The Reproduction-Process Rule Nobody Expects

This is the provision that catches everyone, and among the rules governing patent drawings in Italy it has no analogue in modern practice anywhere else. Article 22 states that drawings reproduced on paper prepared by chemical processes — cyanographic, heliographic, photographic and similar — are not permitted. Reproductions by means of Xerox are expressly allowed.

The vocabulary is of its time: cyanographic is the blueprint process, heliographic the diazo or whiteprint process. The rule was written to keep unstable, fading, chemically-coated reproductions out of a permanent register, and it names xerography as the acceptable alternative because xerographic toner is physically stable.

Two things matter for a modern filing. First, the rule is about the medium and process, not the artwork — a perfectly drawn figure on diazo stock breaches Article 22. Second, it tells you how Italy reads a photograph: photographic reproductions are, as a rule, not admitted. Practitioners who routinely file photographs at the USPTO under the limited allowance in 37 CFR 1.84(b) should not assume the same latitude in Rome.

For an electronic filing the sensible reading is to honour the rule’s purpose: deposit vector or clean raster line art that prints as stable black toner, and keep photographic imagery out of the figure set unless there is genuinely no other way to show the subject.

Rule 4: Numbered Figures, Reference Signs, and Almost No Words

Figures must be numbered progressively, and that obligation applies even where several figures sit on a single drawing sheet. Numbering is per figure, not per page — a sheet carrying three views owes you three numbers.

Identifying numbers and letters used in the figures must be recalled in the description. The pairing is bidirectional in effect: a reference sign in a figure that appears nowhere in the description is a defect, and so is a described element whose sign never appears on a sheet.

On text, Article 22 is strict. The drawing sheets must not contain any wording, with the exception of indications strictly necessary for comprehension and, where relevant, the scale adopted. Flow-chart boxes and block-diagram labels in software and electronics cases need care: keep the labels to the minimum a reader needs, and carry the explanation in the description.

That scale carve-out is worth noticing, because Article 22 also tells you to execute the drawings according to the rules of the art. Italy permits you to state a scale; it does not invite you to annotate. The related discipline of keeping signs consistent across a family is covered in patent drawing reference numerals.

Rule 5: The EPO Searches Your Italian Application

Since 1 July 2008 the European Patent Office has carried out the novelty search for Italian national applications on UIBM’s behalf, returning a search report and written opinion generally within about nine months. For that to happen, the claims must be available in English.

This is the most useful structural fact about Italian prosecution, and it has a direct consequence for patent drawings in Italy: the first expert reader of your Italian figures is an EPO examiner applying EPO conventions. Drawings prepared only to the bare text of Article 22 can clear Italy and still read poorly to the office actually doing the work.

So draft to EPO drawing practice from the outset. One caution, because a great deal of published guidance is now wrong on this point: Rule 46 EPC was deleted with effect from 1 February 2023. The physical requirements for European drawings now live in the Decision of the President of the EPO, in Rule 49(2) EPC and in the Guidelines at Part A, Chapter IX. Competitor articles still citing Rule 46 as live law are citing a provision that no longer exists.

We set out the current European standard in EPO Guidelines A-IX drawings, and the transatlantic differences in USPTO vs EPO patent drawings.

Rule 6: Italy Reopened the PCT National Route — With a Cut-Off

For decades Italy was one of the EPC states that had closed the national route: a PCT applicant could not enter Italy directly and had to obtain a European patent and validate it. A great deal of still-circulating guidance says exactly that, and for a specific class of applications it remains correct.

It changed on 1 July 2020, under the amendments to the Industrial Property Code introduced by the Decreto Crescita. The shape of the current regime:

1. Only PCT applications filed on or after 1 July 2020 that designate or elect Italy can enter the Italian national phase directly.
2. The time limit is 30 months from the international filing date, or from the priority date where one is claimed — not the 31 months some neighbouring offices allow.
3. Entry requires the complete text in Italian of the international application: description, claims, abstract and any drawings.
4. For a PCT application filed before 1 July 2020, the old rule still governs — protection in Italy must come through the EPO regional route and validation.

Two points about patent drawings in Italy follow from that. The 30-month limit is a month shorter than practitioners working to a 31-month habit expect, and the translation obligation reaches into the figures. Any text matter on a sheet — labels, legends, flow-chart wording — has to appear in Italian. Untranslated drawing text is one of the most common avoidable defects on entry, precisely because the figures are handled by a draughtsperson while the translator works on the text files.

Italy is also an EPC state, so the validation route remains fully available and is still the right answer for pre-cut-off PCT families. Note that Italy requires a full Italian translation of a granted European patent rather than a claims-only translation — another route by which text inside your figures becomes a translation deliverable.

Rule 7: Utility Models Use the Same Sheets

Italy maintains a genuine second-tier right, the modello di utilità (utility model), protecting the particular shape or configuration that gives an article new utility. It is granted without a novelty search and runs ten years from filing.

For drawings this matters more than it first appears. A utility model is defined almost entirely by its figures, because what is protected is a configuration. The same Article 22 formalities apply to the sheets — and the evidential weight the figures carry is considerably higher than in an invention patent, where the claims do most of the work.

There is also a conversion mechanism between invention patents and utility models in Italian practice, which is a strong practical reason to prepare a figure set that supports both characterisations from the start: full views, clean sections, and configuration shown unambiguously rather than merely illustrated.

Rule 8: Where Italian Drawing Disputes Are Actually Decided

Italian IP litigation does not go to a general civil court. It goes to the sezioni specializzate in materia di impresa — the specialised business divisions created by Legislative Decree 168/2003 — of which there are twelve seats: Bari, Bologna, Catania, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome, Turin, Trieste and Venice. Appeals run to the territorially competent Corte d’Appello.

Milan is the centre of gravity, and since the Unified Patent Court opened it has become more so. Italy hosts a UPC local division in Milan and, from 27 June 2024, the Milan section of the central division, which handles IPC Section A (human necessities) excluding supplementary protection certificates — competence that was reallocated after the United Kingdom’s departure.

Why this belongs in a drawings article: the central division decides revocation. Revocation is where added-matter and sufficiency arguments are run, and those arguments are frequently argued on the figures — what a drawing did or did not disclose, whether an amendment introduced subject-matter visible only in a redrawn view. Patent drawings in Italy assembled casually at deposit become evidence a decade later.

For local filing practice we cover both principal venues directly: patent drawing services in Milan and patent drawing services in Turin, alongside the wider Italy IP services hub.

Need an Italian-Compliant Figure Set?

PerspireIP prepares patent drawings in Italy — utility, design and utility-model figure sets — to UIBM, EPO and PCT standards — including the black-line conversions that Article 22 requires and the translated text matter that an Italian national-phase entry needs. Talk to our drawing team about your Italian filing.

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