Restaurant licenses in Italy: SCIA, SAB and the 'preposto' route, explained by operators

There's a question foreign investors always ask us, usually with some anxiety: "how much does the restaurant license cost, and how long does it take to get one?". The answer surprises them: in Italy, the "restaurant license" as a permit you buy or win no longer exists. The sector was liberalized in 2010. What exists is a chain of filings — and one professional requirement that looks like a wall to anyone arriving from abroad, but has a perfectly legal door built into it: the preposto.

You don't "get a license" — you file a SCIA

To open a food-and-beverage service business (somministrazione di alimenti e bevande — the technical name for bars and restaurants) you file a SCIA — Certified Notice of Business Start — with the municipality's SUAP desk, almost always online through impresainungiorno.gov.it. The governing law is Legislative Decree 59/2010, Italy's implementation of the EU Services Directive.

The SCIA has a property that seems unbelievable if you come from other systems: it takes effect immediately. You file it and you can open; the administration's checks come afterwards. There is no months-long wait for a permit — provided your paperwork is right.

The exception worth knowing: in some protected zones (typically the historic centres of art cities) the municipality may have set planning criteria, and there a true authorization is required. It's one of the reasons the location choice must come after the zoning check, never before.

The real hurdle: professional requirements

To sign that SCIA, the person (or company) must meet two families of requirements, set by art. 71 of Decree 59/2010:

• Integrity requirements: no relevant convictions, no anti-mafia measures. They apply to owners, partners and directors.
• Professional requirements — at least one of:
  1. the SAB course (Somministrazione Alimenti e Bevande, heir of the old "REC"): a regional course, typically 100+ hours with a final exam;
  2. two years of qualified work experience in the last five, as a properly registered employee or family collaborator in the food sector;
  3. a suitable educational qualification — a hospitality-school diploma or a degree covering relevant subjects (food science, hygiene…).

And here is the foreign investor's problem: they don't have the Italian course, their experience abroad is rarely documentable in the required terms, and their degree often isn't recognized. End of the dream? No.

The preposto route, explained properly

The law itself provides the solution: if the person opening the business lacks the professional requirements, they can appoint a preposto who has them. The preposto (in some regions "delegate for food service") is an individual — a manager, an operating partner, a director — who holds the SAB or the qualified experience, formally accepts the appointment in the SUAP filing, and is answerable for the technical conduct of the business.

In practice, for an S.r.l. set up by a foreign investor:

• the company files the SCIA;
• the integrity requirements must be met by everyone (partners and directors);
• the professional requirements are carried by the appointed preposto.

This is exactly the mechanism we use in the projects we run: the venue opens with a qualified preposto from the operating team, and the investor — if they want the qualification in their own name one day — takes the SAB course at their own pace, with the restaurant already open. No grey-area shortcut: this is the road the legislator deliberately built to separate who invests from who technically runs the place.

The rest of the chain (what nobody tells you)

The commercial SCIA is the famous piece, but a restaurant that opens properly has a queue of filings behind it. The real checklist:

• Health notification (EU Reg. 852/2004): registration of the food business with the local health authority (ASL), filed together with the SCIA. With it, the HACCP self-control plan and staff training.
• Zoning and habitability of the premises: the unit must be compatible with food service. This is the single point that kills the most real-estate negotiations — check it before signing the lease, not after.
• Extraction flue (canna fumaria): required if there's a cooking kitchen (unless locally admitted alternative technologies). In historic centres it can be the project's true bottleneck.
• Acoustic impact: the assessment (or self-certification, where admitted) for music and outdoor seating.
• Public land: outdoor seating (dehors) needs a municipal permit, with a fee.
• Alcohol: the notification to the Customs Agency for selling alcoholic products.
• SIAE (music rights), signage.

None of these steps is dramatic. The drama is discovering them in the wrong order — typically after signing a lease on premises where half of this list can't be satisfied.

The mistakes we see most often

1. "I'll buy the license from a closing restaurant." You're not buying a license (it doesn't exist): you're buying a business or a business unit, with its history, its potential debts and its contracts. Sometimes it makes sense — but it's a real M&A operation, to be done with due diligence.
2. Signing the lease before the checks on zoning, flue and constraints. The contract must be conditional on the outcomes, always.
3. Treating the SAB as a personal obstacle. The investor doesn't need to hold it: someone in the structure does. It's an org-chart question, not a visa question.

How we handle it

In our method this chain is the phase we call "permits and works": we map it for the specific municipality before committing to the premises, the preposto is defined in the operating plan together with the rest of the team, and every filing has a date and an owner inside our management system. It's the boring work that makes the beautiful work possible.

If you're considering a restaurant in Tuscany or Piedmont, start from the complete guide to opening a restaurant in Italy — or write to us: a thirty-minute call clears up more than a hundred forum pages.