What the Court struck down
Emilia-Romagna approved regional law 10 on 19 December 2025, headed Disciplina degli immobili destinati a locazione breve. The Council of Ministers voted to challenge it on 11 February 2026 and filed on 16 February. The public hearing was held on 7 July 2026, with Giovanni Pitruzzella as reporting judge, and the ruling was deposited on 9 October.
Two provisions fell:
Article 4, which created a dedicated urban-planning use for short-term letting inside the tourist-accommodation category, so that switching a property to that use required a building permit
Article 5, which allowed municipalities to set conditions in their planning instruments for short-term letting in defined areas
The Court gave two reasons for striking down article 4. It applied to the entire regional territory, not only to places under pressure, which made it disproportionate to its aim. And it placed the change-of-use burden on short-term landlords alone, while operators of extra-hotel accommodation, who are required to trade in business form, carried no equivalent obligation. The Court treated that as an unreasonable difference in treatment under articles 3 and 41 of the Constitution, which cover equality and economic freedom. Article 5 fell because it depended on article 4.
Not every government argument succeeded. The claim that the region had trespassed on the state's exclusive competence over competition was rejected as unfounded. The rest of law 10 remains in force.
What regions can still do
The ruling reads differently alongside judgment 186/2025, filed on 17 December 2025, in which the same Court rejected the government's challenge to Tuscany's tourism code, regional law 61/2024. Article 59 of that law lets provincial capital municipalities, and those classed as having high tourist density under article 182 of decree-law 34/2020, set limits and exclusion zones for short-term lets, with an optional five-year authorisation for each unit.
The Court upheld it on the grounds that tourism and territorial government are regional competences, that municipal discretion is needed to tell an art city from a small village, and that the exercise of that discretion remains open to review by the administrative courts. Read together, the two judgments draw a line. A targeted power, handed to named categories of municipality and applied zone by zone, survives. A single rule imposed across a whole region does not.
Where Sardinia stands
Sardinia has no regional law of either kind. Short-term lets here are governed by the national CIN registration code and by regional tourism rules on classified structures, and no Sardinian comune has been designated under the criteria the European Commission proposed in its Affordable Housing Act on 9 September 2026.
The argument for one is being made locally. In an opinion piece in L'Unione Sarda on 7 October 2026, Pierpaolo Murgia wrote that short-term and extra-hotel accommodation should stay but that their excess should be limitato con decisione, limited decisively, and called for a regional law letting municipalities set limits and authorisations in saturated neighbourhoods. He cited judgment 186/2025 and the Tuscan model by name. The piece is an opinion column, not a bill: no draft law on short-term lets is before the Sardinian regional council.
The scale question is still open here. Regional figures for 2025 counted 46,024 private lodgings on the island, 15,926 of them in Gallura Nord-Est Sardegna around Olbia and Golfo Aranci. In March 2026 the regional tourism councillor, Franco Cuccureddu, described the growth in short-term lets as fast while saying the island did not yet have overtourism.
A note on the ruling
This account rests on the Court's own case file for ricorso 2/2026, which lists the challenged provisions and the procedural dates, and on reporting of the judgment deposited on 9 October. The full text carries the reasoning that summaries compress, and anyone relying on it for a planning or licensing decision should read it rather than press coverage. The Italian phrases quoted here appear in the reporting of the decision; the English renderings are translations. The ruling binds Emilia-Romagna's law and sets a reading of the Constitution that other regions must work within, but it does not by itself change any rule in force in Sardinia.
Sources: Corte costituzionale, case file for ricorso 2/2026 · Il Sole 24 Ore NT+ Diritto, judgment 164/2026 (9 October 2026) · ANSA, 9 October 2026 · Il Resto del Carlino, reactions (9 October 2026) · Studio Tecnico Pagliai on judgment 186/2025 and Tuscan law 61/2024 · L'Unione Sarda, opinion piece (7 October 2026) · Regione Sardegna, Osservatorio del Turismo, Capacita ricettiva 2025