Les biens vitaux dans le droit italien

This paper takes up the reflections made during a conference dedicated to the challenges of property in the 21st century, where I was asked to reflect on the possible emergence of the category of “vital goods”. In order to define its possible content, I started from Article 25 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which identifies certain needs whose satisfaction is vital to ensure dignity. Some of these needs can only be met by goods, which generate the utilities necessary to satisfy them, while others require the provision of services. Once the notion of vital goods has been circumscribed only to the former, it has been noted that the satisfaction of fundamental needs by means of access to the utilities generated by goods can be made effective by means of a plurality of legal techniques that the Italian and French doctrine has framed by recourse to the two cartesian axes of attribution and distribution and placing the different solutions in relation to the mode of being of the goods. Some examples taken from legislation and case law on water and housing have made it possible to verify how the vital nature of certain goods has consequences on the regulation of the relationships that are grafted onto these goods. Consideration was also given to the rules protecting those who already own vital goods against their loss; this protection constitutes a complementary aspect of the legal status of vital goods. It has been concluded that the legislator has intervened with different techniques, and with a discipline that is certainly scattered but which finds its own axis of order in the "vital" character of certain goods.