UK/London based Notary?????

There are inheritance tax implications in the UK.  I suspect you will also need to pay house purchase tax in Italy (not sure of percentage 3% or 10%).  You could establish a Trust or you could transfer the freehold to the children and retain the user rights until your death! House purchase tax on the latter may different!  Whatever you do you should see your tax accountant, italian and English lawyers (there may be implications for your other dependents)!  There is no other way out!I am not a lawyer or a tax accountant my advice is based on my personal experience!  Any advice from other people should not be considered, if you do and act on them make sure they have professional liability insurance otherwise you cannot get back to them if things go wrong! Hence my disclaimer to you for the above!The Italian London Chamber of Commerce has a members directory:http://www.italchamind.co.uk/ Good luck! Serge 

i would suggest you contact someone like charlotte oliver who is an italian based(rome) solicitor... who is pretty much a specialist in this field ...c.oliver@studiopaoletti.comUk and Italian qualified we use her services re house sales and any other contracts... both us and our clients and so far have not been disappointed... she also writes detailed articles on wills relating from a UK/Italian perspective so pretty much agree with the advice above...get a professional ... i would basically skip the UK based specialists... they have never done what they promised ...in our experience... but get detailed advice from someone that knows... to make sure you get the best deal for both you and your family 

We are just in the process of helping some friends who bought a few years ago. For some reason one of the threes owners names was left off the contract. Advice so far from 2 different Notaios is that to put all three names on a new act needs to be drawn up and the costs will be the same as for a sale, but without the taxes. I assume that it will be the same as for a transfer to a family member.If you did it in England you would still have to get the new names registered against the property in Italy, a Notaios job, so you may end up paying twice. There is a Notary on the InCalabria forum who holds surgeries in England (London) who handles sales and signatures there but registers them here in Italy. He is called Posteraro and may be worth a call but the Italian based Lawyer in Rome sounds the best option as advised above. I assume the Lawyer will still have to use a Notaio though so the costs will be higher.We took advice about our will before we left the UK last year and made a detailed will in England in which we gave our wishes for disposal of all assets worldwide. We have now told a lawyer here that in the event of both or either of our deaths the assets muct be dealt with in accordance with our English will. This is quite legal, we were told, so long as you ensure that you do the second part and lodge your request with an Italian Lawyer. This means that the kids don't automatically get half of the estate if I die (as is the norm in Italy) but my wife gets to keep it all so that she can go on to get a toy boy and waste it extravagantly, she tells me. 

 http://www.notarypublicinlondon.com/index.htmlnotaio in London

 be aware that there are significant differences between an Italian "latin" notary (civil law) and the English notary public (common law).http://www.notariato.it/portal/site/notariatoEng/menuitem.2986b81bf76e37...You need an Italian notary. The easiest way to do this is get power of attorney for someone else to sign for you (this is inexpensive and easily done through the Italian embassy) and instructing a notary in Italy to do the transfer.PS you really need to ask a notaio for definitive advice but this may need to be done by way of a donation (atto di donazione) which can have tricky future implications - this is where a lawyer like Charlotte will come in useful.

As this is a 'long term' plan, I think I'll have a chat with an Italian mate, to see what he can find out 'locally'