La mappa e il territorio. Note sull'intenzione del legislatore nel Diritto privato.

Building on the findings of the PRIN research project Looking for Legislative Intent in Judicial Reasoning, this paper offers a qualitative, diachronic, and institutional analysis of the role of legislative intent (IdL) in Italian private law. Quantitative data from the Civil Court of Cassation (2014–2023) depict legislative intent as a predominantly auxiliary argument, employed in a communicative function with reference to the historical legislator. The paper takes this map as a starting point for a ground-level inquiry into the case law of the Court, tracing four itineraries across areas shaped by major reforms: corporate law, employment law, adoption, and competition law. The case analysis reveals a significant gap between the late-twentieth-century theoretical framework on the relationship between the Civil Code and special legislation. Historical legislative intent does not always guide the self-integration of special law; in certain cases, it is neutralised by the ab auctoritate reasoning, embedded in the doctrine of «diritto vivente»; while in EU-derived law it appears redundant in light of the principle of effectiveness developed by the Court of Justice. The reasons for this gap lie in the polycentric configuration of the legal order, driven by European integration and the European Convention on Human Rights: a legal order in which the differentiation of normative systems intertwines with the differentiation of law-making centres, principles are distributed across a constellation of national and supra-national instruments, and legal interpretation takes on the character of the opera aperta. In this context, legislative intent in its objective sense (ratio legis) retains an important role but has lost its primacy, while historical legislative intent is now arguably relevant only in the case of individual-measure statutes (leggi-provvedimento).