it-eli-mcp
An MCP server for Italian law, in two layers:
- Legislation via Normattiva, the official portal of theMinistero della Giustizia. It fetches acts as Akoma Ntoso with verifiable URN:NIR andELI identifiers, and returns the text as it stood on any past date (multivigenza). Live andkeyless.
- Constitutional case law (Corte Costituzionale): a local, keyless full-text index of everydecision since 1956, each with its native ECLI, built from the Court's official open data.
- Supreme Court case law (Corte di Cassazione): live, keyless full-text search over SentenzeWeb,the Court's own free public search engine - civil and criminal decisions, full OCR text, no localindex to build.
- Administrative case law (Consiglio di Stato, C.G.A.R.S., TAR): live, keyless search over theGiustizia Amministrativa portal's own public decision search - one backend for the wholeadministrative jurisdiction, 3.4M+ provvedimenti with native ECLI and structured full text.
Italy has the EU's largest legal profession by headcount - roughly 240,000 lawyers per CCBEfigures, ahead of Germany and Spain. No live, keyless MCP connector covered its statute book. Thisone does, and it also covers the constitutional case law.
Part of the MateMatic eu-legal-mcp production line: the Italian sibling of de-eli-mcp (Germany)and sejm-eli-mcp (Poland), built on the same architecture and citation contract against theItalian source.
No JSON API. Normattiva does not publish a REST API. This connector drives the samesession-based flow a browser uses - resolve a URN, read the act page, fetch its Akoma Ntosoexport - so every act comes back as structured XML with its ELI intact. See
DISCOVERY.md.Licence. Italian official legal texts are outside copyright (art. 5, l. 633/1941), andNormattiva declares CC-BY-4.0 for its data from 2026-01-01. This connector relays individualacts on request, with attribution and a
source_url; it does not bulk-harvest the database(Normattiva's terms restrict that). Every response carries adataset_note. (A practitioner'sread, not formal legal advice.)Cassazione is NOT Italgiure/ItalgiureWeb. The Court's full-database search(ItalgiureWeb, 35M+ documents) is free only for the judiciary; practitioners pay asubscription. This connector does not use that service. It queries SentenzeWeb(
italgiure.giustizia.it/sncass), a separate, free, public search engine the Courtitself publishes, under the Italian Open Data License (IODL 2.0), with no authentication
- verified live during development (see
DISCOVERY.md). Coverage is narrower than the fullItalgiure database but real: 420K+ civil and criminal decisions with full OCR text.
Legislation tools (Normattiva, live)
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
it_list_codes |
The major Italian codes and consolidated acts (Codice civile, penale, di procedura, privacy/GDPR, CAD, D.Lgs. 231/2001, Costituzione, L. 241/1990) with their canonical URN. |
it_resolve |
Turns act coordinates (act_type, year, number) into a canonical, resolvable URN:NIR. Offline. |
it_get_act |
Fetches act metadata (title, date, ELI, article count) for a code name, URN, ELI path, or normattiva.it URL. |
it_get_text |
Fetches the text of a whole act or a single article - with at_date for the point-in-time version. |
Constitutional case-law tools (Corte Costituzionale, local index)
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
it_case_search |
Full-text search over the decisions (heading, reasoning, operative part). Filters by year and type (sentenza/ordinanza). Accent-insensitive. |
it_case_get_decision |
The full text of one decision, by ECLI (ECLI:IT:COST:2024:1) or by year + number. |
it_case_recent |
The most recent decisions (newest first). |
it_case_stats |
Index coverage: total decisions, year range, counts by type, last build time. |
The case-law tools read a local SQLite index that is provisioned automatically on the firstcall - no setup step. On first use the server downloads a small, sha256-verified pre-builtcost.sqlite.gz from the GitHub release (built and attached by CI on each release) anddecompresses it, or, if none is published, builds the index from the Court's open data (alldecisions since 1956); the index is then cached under ~/.matematic and every later callqueries it offline. it_case_stats reports provenance and ingested_at so you can see howfresh it is.
To refresh, or to pre-build it ahead of time (e.g. in an offline deployment), run:
italy-eli-mcp-caselaw-ingest
Tuning env vars: IT_ELI_CASELAW_INDEX_URL (override/disable the pre-built download),IT_ELI_CASELAW_INDEX_SHA256 (pin the checksum), IT_ELI_CASELAW_AUTOBUILD=0 (skip theautomatic local build). The legislation tools need no index; they fetch live.
Supreme Court case-law tools (Corte di Cassazione, SentenzeWeb, live)
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
it_cassazione_search |
Full-text search over decision bodies. Filters: chamber ('civile'/'penale'), sub_chamber ('lavoro'/'tributaria'), anno (year). Returns ranked hits with a highlighted snippet. |
it_cassazione_get |
The full text of one decision by its SentenzeWeb sic_id (from a search hit). |
No ingest step - every call queries SentenzeWeb live. Coverage: civil (snciv, ~190K) andcriminal (snpen, ~238K) decisions, including the Labour (szdec:L, ~30K) and Tax (szdec:5,~59K) sub-chambers, full OCR text.
Administrative case-law tools (Consiglio di Stato, C.G.A.R.S., TAR, live)
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
it_ga_search |
Full-text search and/or decision-number lookup over the Giustizia Amministrativa portal - one backend for the whole administrative jurisdiction (3.4M+ provvedimenti). Filters: sede, tipo, numero, anno. Hits carry the court's native ECLI. |
it_ga_get_decision |
The full text of one decision by its document_url (taken verbatim from a search hit). |
No ingest step - every call queries the portal's own public decision search live.
Citation verification (anti-hallucination)
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
it_verify_citations |
Extracts Italian legal citations from any text (a drafted answer, a memo, a contract clause) and verifies each one against its source. Statute citations (art. 2043 c.c., art. 5 della legge 241/1990, artt. 1341 e 1342 c.c., commi) are checked against the live Normattiva act, article by article; ECLI:IT:COST:* citations are checked against the local Constitutional Court index. |
What it reports, per citation and overall:
- Existence with a range hint. A cited article that does not exist comes back as
not_foundwith a hint of what does exist:art. 9999 does not exist in this act; the act has 372 articles, numbered art. 1-372. - Optional content check. A parenthetical description right after a citation(
art. 2043 c.c. (risarcimento per fatto illecito)) is compared with the real provision usinga character-trigram match. A mismatch is a review signal (content_mismatch), never a hardblock - paraphrase is legitimate. - Hard semantics. When any cited article does not exist, the result status is
HALLUCINATION_DETECTEDand the tool response carriesisError=true, so a calling modelcannot mistake it for a passed check. When the text contains no citations at all, the statusisNO_CITATIONS_FOUND- explicitly NOT a verification success. - Structured
gaps. Everything the tool could not verify is listed as a typed gap(out_of_corpus,unparseable_citation,act_unresolvable,upstream_unavailable,comma_not_checkable) instead of being hidden in prose. An act Normattiva cannot resolve is agap, not a hallucination: existence is unknown, not disproven. Cassazione andadministrative-court ECLIs are out of the local corpus; verify those withit_cassazione_search/it_ga_search.
it_verify_citations(text="L'art. 2043 c.c. e l'art. 9999 della legge 241/1990 si applicano.")
→ status: "HALLUCINATION_DETECTED" (isError=true)
citations: [
{raw: "art. 2043 c.c.", status: "verified", ...},
{raw: "art. 9999 della legge 241/1990", status: "not_found",
range_hint: "art. 9999 does not exist in this act; the act has <N> articles, ..."}
]
gaps: []
The parse-verify-report loop is adapted from chrisryugj/korean-law-mcp (MIT) - seeTHIRD_PARTY.md. The content matcher uses character trigrams (the Korean original uses bigrams,which fit an agglutinative script; trigrams discriminate better for Italian).
Every legislation response carries the citation contract: eli_uri (e.g.eli/id/1990/08/18/090G0294/CONSOLIDATED), urn (e.g. urn:nir:stato:legge:1990-08-07;241),human_readable_citation (e.g. Legge 7 agosto 1990, n. 241), and source_url.
How it identifies an act
- URN:NIR -
urn:nir:{authority}:{type}:{date};{number}. A partial URN with the year alone(urn:nir:stato:legge:1990;241) also resolves, so you can cite an act you only know as"L. 241/1990". - ELI -
eli/id/{year}/{month}/{day}/{code}/CONSOLIDATED, read from the act itself. Neverinvented.
Examples
it_list_codes()
→ [{key: "codice civile", urn: "urn:nir:stato:regio.decreto:1942-03-16;262", ...}, ...]
it_resolve(act_type="d.lgs", year=2001, number=231)
→ {urn: "urn:nir:stato:decreto.legislativo:2001;231",
human_readable_citation: "Decreto legislativo n. 231/2001", source_url: "..."}
it_get_text(reference="codice civile", article="2043")
→ art. 2043 c.c. (Risarcimento per fatto illecito), with eli_uri + source_url
it_get_text(reference="codice privacy", article="1", at_date="2010-01-01")
→ the privacy code's art. 1 as it stood on 1 January 2010
it_cassazione_search(query="responsabilita medica", chamber="civile", limit=5)
→ {total_found: 81177, hits: [{sic_id: "snciv2025224393O",
citation: "Cass. civ., ord. n. 24393/2025", snippet: "...", source_url: "..."}, ...]}
it_cassazione_get(sic_id="snciv2025224393O")
→ {citation: "Cass. civ., ord. n. 24393/2025", testo: "...", massima: "...", source_url: "..."}
Install
cd it-eli-mcp
pip install -e .
Configure (Claude Code / any MCP client)
Copy .mcp.json.example:
{
"mcpServers": {
"it-eli-mcp": { "command": "italy-eli-mcp" }
}
}
Windows 11 with Smart App Control
Smart App Control blocks unsigned executables, which covers uvx.exe, pip.exeand the italy-eli-mcp.exe launcher that pip writes at install time. The python.exe andpy.exe from the python.org installer are signed by the Python SoftwareFoundation, so running the module through the interpreter works:
python -m pip install italy-eli-mcp
python -m it_eli_mcp
pip.exe is blocked for the same reason, so install with python -m pip, notpip install. If python is not on PATH, use the Windows launcher: py -3 -m it_eli_mcp.
{ "mcpServers": { "italy-eli-mcp": { "command": "python", "args": ["-m", "it_eli_mcp"] } } }
Do not turn Smart App Control off to work around this - it cannot be re-enabledwithout reinstalling Windows.
Environment:
IT_ELI_BASE_URL- defaulthttps://www.normattiva.itIT_ELI_CACHE_DIR- default~/.matematic/cache/it-eliIT_ELI_AUDIT_DIR- default~/.matematic/auditIT_ELI_CASELAW_DB- constitutional case-law index path (default~/.matematic/data/it-eli-caselaw/cost.sqlite)IT_ELI_CASELAW_INDEX_URL- pre-built index download URL (default: the GitHub release asset;''disables)IT_ELI_CASELAW_INDEX_SHA256- pin the expected index checksum instead of fetching the.sha256sidecarIT_ELI_CASELAW_AUTOBUILD-0to skip the automatic local build (prefer theindex_missingerror)
Tests
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest -m "not smoke" # offline (URN, Akoma Ntoso parser, case-law index, drift)
pytest -m smoke # live: Normattiva + Corte Costituzionale open data + SentenzeWeb
Audit trail
Every tool call appends one JSON line to ~/.matematic/audit/it-eli-mcp.jsonl (timestamp, tool,input hash, output size, duration, status) for AI Act art. 12 record-keeping. No raw query text isstored.
Licence
Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.
