Tap water in Italy: safe to drink, with two caveats

You can drink Italian tap water. Since 21 March 2023, it has been governed by Decreto Legislativo 18/2023, which requires monitoring from abstraction to the tap. The limit values come from the same EU Directive 2020/2184 on which the German Drinking Water Ordinance is also based.

Where caution is needed, it is stated explicitly at the tap: in Italy, taps with non-drinkable water carry the sign “acqua non potabile”. If a public tap has no sign, its water is considered approved for drinking.

Two points remain nonetheless: in the Mezzogiorno and in Sicily and Sardinia, the supply has been rationed several times in recent years. And Italians themselves drink their tap water less often than Germans do. The reasons are taste and long-standing habit, not a safety problem.

The legal basis is Decreto Legislativo 18/2023, in force since 21 March 2023. It transposes the EU Drinking Water Directive 2020/2184 into Italian law and replaced the old decree from 2001.

The most important change concerns the scope of monitoring. Previously, the supplier's obligation ended at the water meter. Today it extends to the tap. Per- and polyfluorinated chemicals, bisphenol A and uranium have also been added to monitoring.

The decree is based on a risk-based approach following the World Health Organization model. For this purpose, every supplier draws up a water safety plan, in Italian Piano di Sicurezza dell'Acqua. It covers the route from source to tap. Scientific support is provided by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Italy's highest public health institute.

Most important for travellers is Article 18, “Informazioni al pubblico”. It obliges every supplier to provide four items of information each year. These must include the water quality, including indicator parameters, and the price per litre and per cubic metre. They also include the household's consumption and a link to the website with the detailed values. In addition, suppliers report every six months to the national centre for water safety, CeNSiA, via the AnTeA register.

In practical terms, this means that measured values are published for every supply area. However, they are scattered across the individual utilities.

The key figures on water supply are published every year on World Water Day by the national statistics institute, the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT). The report from March 2026 gives five figures:

In 2024, Italy abstracted around 8.87 billion cubic metres of water for drinking water needs. That is the lowest figure in 25 years and 3.0% less than in 2022. Per capita, the country ranks 2nd in the EU behind Ireland, and it has ranked 1st for total volume for more than 20 years. That amounts to 411 litres per inhabitant per day, spread across around 37,400 abstraction points.

• 42.4% network losses in distribution in 2022: 45.5% where municipalities run the supply themselves, 41.9% with specialised operators.
• 29.9% of families avoided drinking tap water in 2025, ranging from 19.6% in the north-east to 56.2% on the islands.
• 83.3% of the population aged 11 and over drink at least half a litre of mineral water every day. In Umbria the figure is 92.1%, while the Province of Bolzano has the lowest share at 53.9%.

For comparison: in 2002, 40.1% of families still avoided their tap water. So trust is growing, albeit slowly. The arguments for tap water instead of mineral water are explained there.

Network losses say little about the quality of the water that arrives at the tap. But they do explain why water quickly runs short in dry summers.

The rationing in 2024 reveals the real pattern. It was triggered by persistent drought and outdated pipe networks, exacerbated in Sicily by a 30% drop in reservoir levels. More than a million people in provincial capitals were affected, i.e. 5.8% of the population there. A total of 17 cities were involved, compared with 14 the year before. In Agrigento, the supply did not run normally on a single day of the year; instead, it alternated weekly depending on the district.

In the north, by contrast, only around 3% of families report irregularities. Anyone holidaying on Lake Garda, in South Tyrol or in Milan faces a different supply situation from someone in Sicily.

Along the same route, the neighbouring countries have their own rules. You can read about tap water in Croatia and tap water in Austria in the respective guides.

At the end of June 2024, according to estimates, more than a thousand people in Torri del Benaco on the eastern shore of Lake Garda, in the province of Verona, fell ill with gastroenteritis. Around sixty of them went to an emergency department. On 27 June, the municipality imposed a ban on using tap water for drinking or preparing food.

Norovirus was identified as the pathogen. It is one of the most common germs in tap water. The cause is considered to be a technical failure at the Pontirola pumping station two days earlier. As a result, no chlorine was added for several hours. Samples taken on 28 June tested positive; from 29 June onwards, all samples were negative. On 2 July, the mayor lifted the ban.

Only Torri del Benaco and the hamlet of Albisano were affected. The neighbouring municipalities are connected to their own networks and were not affected. Four bodies were involved in the investigation. The health authority Ulss 9 Scaligera and the Veneto regional environmental agency (ARPAV) led the procedure. They were joined by the supplier Azienda Gardesana Servizi and the laboratory of the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna.

There are two lessons in this. Detection, ban, search for the cause and lifting of the ban were all completed within five days. And the case shows how small the Italian networks are. A disruption usually ends at the municipal boundary, so an incident in one town rarely applies to the next.

There has been no comparable case at Lake Garda since then. Anyone reading the reports from that time without the year could easily mistake them for breaking news.

There is no nationwide map of drinking water quality in Italy. The data are held by the individual suppliers, and that is exactly where they must be published under Article 18 of Decreto Legislativo 18/2023.

You can get there in three steps:

1. Identify the supplier. Search for the name of the town together with “gestore idrico” or “acquedotto”. As a rule, the responsible utility appears first.
2. Open the quality page. The section is almost always called “qualità dell'acqua”. It lists the analysis values, often broken down by municipality or supply zone.
3. Read the values. Of interest are hardness, nitrate, chloride and chlorine content. The figures are comparable with the German limit values because both countries follow the same EU directive.

Acea Ato 2 goes furthest for Rome and the surrounding area. On its water quality page, you can enter an address. The corresponding point on the map provides a PDF with the average values of the chemical analyses over 12 months. In Naples, the municipal utility ABC, short for Acqua Bene Comune, publishes its laboratory values monthly.

In smaller municipalities, the local health authority, the Azienda Sanitaria Locale (ASL), can help. It carries out the official monitoring in addition to the supplier's own checks.

The same legal situation applies to accommodation as to private households: water from the washbasin is drinking water unless a sign says otherwise. Some establishments nevertheless put up notices to encourage guests to buy bottled water. A look at the signage clarifies this.

In holiday apartments and holiday homes, it is worth giving the domestic plumbing a second thought. If an apartment has been empty for two weeks, stagnant water forms: it sits in the pipes and takes on room temperature. So let it run for two to three minutes until it becomes noticeably cooler.

At campsites, taps for drinking water and non-drinking water are separate and labelled accordingly. When filling a motorhome tank: rinse the hose beforehand and do not leave the tank half full in hot weather.

Brushing your teeth with tap water is no problem anywhere in Italy. Ice cubes in bars and restaurants are also made from drinking water, because the catering industry is subject to the same requirements.

A filter does not make unsafe water safe. In the event of a ban like the one in Torri del Benaco, only the authority's order counts.

A filter makes sense for two other reasons. The first is taste. Where water is chlorinated, you can taste and smell the chlorine long before the limit value is reached. An activated carbon filter reliably binds free chlorine and the associated odorous substances. The second reason is the domestic plumbing. In older buildings, there is a stretch of pipe between the service connection and the tap for which the supplier is no longer responsible. For this, Alb Filter offers portable drinking water filters with activated carbon.

When travelling by motorhome or caravan, there is a third reason. Water from the tank stands for longer and gets warm, which favours germs. How to set up water treatment in a motorhome is explained in a separate guide.

The limits of a filter are just as important. Limescale remains in the water unless the filter contains an ion exchanger. And against bacteria after damage to the network, only sterile filtration or boiling will help.