Importing From India to Italy

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Between 2023 and 2025 Italy's market authorities flagged eight Indian-made perfumes and fragrance sets on the EU's product-safety alert system, every one of them for the same banned fragrance, lilial (Safety Gate alert 10096221 (opens in a new tab), 2025, one of the eight). Nothing else Italy reported on Indian goods in those years comes close as a pattern. Someone kept buying the same formula, and someone kept catching it.

That's the Italian story in one line - the rules are EU rules, but each country's inspectors have their own habits. This page covers what is actually Italian about buying from India: the VAT, a leather law most foreign suppliers have never heard of, what Italian controls keep stopping, and the ports. Duty and the EU-wide product rules are on the bloc page, and we don't repeat them here.

Last researched 28 September 2026 · Next review 24 October 2026 · Written by SourcingFrom

Duty is the same in every member state, so it lives on the EU bloc page: MFN or GSP today, the FTA not yet in force.

1. What Italian Inspectors Keep Stopping

Lilial (butylphenyl methylpropional) has been banned in EU cosmetics since 1 March 2022 (Regulation (EU) 2021/1902 (opens in a new tab)). Plenty of Indian attar and perfume houses still use older formulas for their home market and for Gulf buyers, where the rule is different. So if you import Indian fragrance into Italy, ask for the full ingredient list against the EU banned list before the order, not after the alert. Our count shows Italy raised 8 of the 32 lilial alerts on Indian goods across the EU, second only to Hungary (our analysis of Safety Gate (opens in a new tab), 2021 to September 2026).

Food is the bigger file. Italy notified 117 RASFF alerts on Indian food between 2021 and September 2026, fifth in the EU. The single largest cause was ethylene oxide, in 24 of them, often in sesame, psyllium and botanical extracts. The most recent were aflatoxin in Indian broken rice in July 2026 (RASFF 2026.6617 (opens in a new tab)). Test plans by product are on Quality control.

2. Italy's Own Leather Law

This one is purely Italian. Legislative Decree 68 of 9 June 2020, in force since 24 October 2020, controls how the words "cuoio", "pelle" and "pelliccia" may be used, and how goods sold under those words are labelled, online included. Footwear sits outside it, under the EU footwear directive 94/11/EC (Normattiva, D.Lgs. 68/2020, Article 1 (opens in a new tab)).

Why does that matter for Kanpur, Agra or Chennai leather? Because a bag labelled "pelle" in Italy has to be the material the decree defines, and bonded or coated leathers don't simply borrow the word. Send your supplier the Italian wording you plan to use and ask them to confirm the material spec behind it in writing. We haven't read how inspectors apply the decree's detailed definitions to imported goods, so treat a doubtful case as a question for your customs broker.

3. VAT and the Label

Import VAT (IVA) is charged at the Italian standard rate of 22% (Your Europe, VAT rates (opens in a new tab), checked by the Commission 13 July 2026). Textile fibre labels must be in Italian under the EU textile regulation, so a label printed for Germany won't do.

4. Italy Is a Buyer and a Rival

Italy took US$7.79 billion of Indian goods in FY2025-26, India's eleventh-largest export market (PIB, 15 April 2026 (opens in a new tab), our computation). It's also India's competitor in the same categories. In the UK, Italy holds 17.3% of leather goods imports against India's 7.7% (our analysis of UN Comtrade, 2025, on the UK page).

So an Italian firm buying Indian leather is usually buying a component or a private-label line, not a finished "Made in Italy" product. That's normal business, and plenty of Italian brands do it well. Just know which one you're buying, because the origin marking, the leather wording and the price story all change with it.

5. Ports and the Canal Question

Customs is the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli (opens in a new tab). Genoa, La Spezia, Gioia Tauro and Trieste are the container gateways.

Italy is the first EU landfall on a Suez routing from India and the last on a Cape routing. None of the six Indian gateways we mapped listed an Italian port as a direct destination, and no schedule we read named the canal. So ask your forwarder which way the service runs and put the route on every quote. It can swing the transit by a couple of weeks.

Next Step

The duty position and EU product rules are on the EU bloc page. Every Indian agreement is on India's trade agreements.