Over 22 centuries ago, a principle was born to protect the foreigner. Today, the same principle guides our work in Sardinia.
Rome was caput mundi, capital of the world, and not by accident.
The wisdom of the men who governed it, formally (or, far more often, from behind the scenes), can be traced in the insight of visionaries who understood, early on, what it meant to be great, and what it took to become even greater.
Rome never loved the foreigner out of sentiment. It loved him out of necessity, and from that necessity it drew one of its most refined inventions: the idea, remarkably ahead of its time, that justice should protect foreigners too.
Until the 3rd century BC, the Ius Civile, Roman law in its purest form, was a fortress for the few, riddled with traps. Rigid, formalistic, reserved solely for the civis, the Roman citizen. Its sacred formulas (the famous legis actiones) had to be recited word for word: a single mispronounced syllable could collapse an entire contract.
For a Roman, raised inside that language, it was already complex.
For a foreigner, a peregrinus, it was simply impossible.
Foreigners who came to Rome to trade, invest, or acquire property constantly risked void contracts or outright deception, simply because they didn’t know the archaic formulas of local law.
But Rome was already becoming what it would remain for centuries: a crossroads of merchants, capital, and people in motion. Closing the doors of the law to those arriving from abroad meant strangling the very economy that made the city great.
The solution came in 242 BC, with the creation of a new figure: the Praetor Peregrinus, the praetor of foreigners. His task was not to blindly apply local law, but to build a new body of law, the Ius Gentium, grounded not in Rome’s formal technicalities, but in a universal principle, understandable to anyone, from any land: bona fides, good faith. The idea that an honest agreement deserves protection, regardless of the passport of the person signing it.
Many of the categories we now take for granted in contract law, good faith, equity, substance over form, were born right there, in the office of a new “defender” whose sole task was to protect those who didn’t know the local rules.
From Rome to Sardinia: The Same Question, Two Thousand Years Later
Anyone coming from abroad today to buy a villa in Porto Cervo, a penthouse in Alghero, an estate in the Gallura countryside, or a plot of land near the coast finds themselves, proportions aside, in the exact position of the Roman peregrinus.
They don’t know Italian Civil Law.
They don’t know the regional landscape restrictions, the silent easements weighing on a property, the clauses a real estate agent may overlook and a local notary takes for granted, clauses that, for someone coming from a different legal system (common law, German law, Scandinavian law), are entirely foreign territory.
The question Rome asked itself over 22 centuries ago is, in substance, the same one anyone working in international real estate law asks today: how do we guarantee someone from abroad the same contractual and legal security as someone born here?
Rome’s answer was a dedicated figure.
Our answer, today, is legal counsel that acts as a defender, as a translator, not just of language, but of systems and culture, bridging Sardinian and Italian law and the understanding of the foreign buyer. Not a mere advocatus applying the rule, but a guarantor of rights and good faith who equates the protection of the foreigner with that of the local citizen, translating the law into contractual security for everyone.
A Legacy We Carry Forward
There’s something almost moving in realizing that the idea of protecting those who buy property on foreign soil isn’t an invention of modern real estate tourism, but a principle the Romans had already written into law over two thousand years ago.
Law, in this sense, has never been just a set of rules: from the very beginning, it has been a bridge.
Every time we guide a foreign buyer through a notarial deed in Sardinia, we are continuing — without rhetoric, but with historical awareness, a profession as old as Rome itself.
Not just advocatus.
Also, in substance, a modern Praetor Peregrinus.
Note: the dating of 242 BC for the establishment of the Praetor Peregrinus is the date traditionally reported by Roman legal historiography; some legal historians debate margins of uncertainty around the exact chronology, though this doesn’t affect the historical substance of the role. From 242 BC to today (2026 AD) is roughly 2,268 years — over 22 centuries.