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Thirty days, and why the landlord cares
The registration the landlord mentions is not a formality he is being conscientious about. An unregistered lease in Italy is, for most purposes, no lease at all: the law treats it as void, and the consequences fall mainly on the owner, who can be pursued for back tax and find the rent reset by a judge to a figure well below what was agreed. For the tenant an unregistered contract is bad in a different way — without one you cannot establish residenza at the address, which Lesson 56 is about to show matters for almost everything else. La cedolare secca, introduced in 2011, is why he sounds relaxed. Instead of adding rent to his income and paying his top rate on it, he pays a flat percentage and skips the duty stamp and registration tax. It made declared tenancies markedly more attractive than they had been, in a market where undeclared ones were routine and still exist — if a landlord proposes no contract, or a contract for less than the rent you are actually paying, that is what is being proposed, and the person without papers in the arrangement is you. The three-month preavviso Francesca flags is the other number to know: it is normal, it is negotiable only in writing, and leaving without it costs you the caparra.