L’AFFIDAMENTO E L’ADOZIONE EN EL DERECHO CIVIL ITALIANO.

Abstract

Italian law acknowledges that children have the right to grow up and be educated in a family. To guarantee that this right is effectively satisfied, as required by article 31 of the Constitution, and to prevent situations of abandonment, the national government as well as other regional and local authorities have established a set of support and aid measures. This is stated in Act 184 of 2 May 1983, as worded by Act 149 of 28 March 2001. To handle cases where the natural family is not prepared to see to the raising and education of a child, Italian law establishes two different institutions, fostering (affidamento) and adoption (adozione). Fostering is to provide the child with the good family atmosphere of which the child has been temporarily deprived, while adoption creates a fully fledged parent-child relationship between persons who have no blood ties between them. The institution of adoption has undergone major reforms in recent decades, reforms that have ended up changing its original function. In the beginning, adoption was meant to provide the childless with a means of passing on both their name and their estate. Though this function has not utterly vanished, it has gradually waned in importance. Nowadays the primordial purpose of adoption is to place a child who has been deprived of a family in a new family, one that is ready to see to the child's needs and provide a good environment in which the child can grow. Adoption is presented, therefore, as a mechanism essentially aimed at protecting the adopted child's interest in having a good family, and only indirectly does it discharge the function of satisfying the adoptive parents' interest in having a child.