This paper aims at underlining how an important piece of the modern history of Italian property law, namely the rules pertaining to land registration, has been built through the constant dialogue with the Austrian model. In the course of the 19th and 20th century the Austrian land book system has performed at least three contributions to our legal system: (a) it has been the applied, living law in certain territories of the North and North-East of Italy; (b) it has become current Italian law for those territories which are regulated today by a special system for the land registration, in contrast with the general regime of trascrizione governed by the Italian civil code; and (c) it has represented a superior term of reference for the continuous aspirations to reform of the Italian trascrizione. Today, after many decades of technical innovations, scholars and practitioners come again to invoke the need for a reform of the land registration system based on the Austrian model.
