The law-making function is the process whereby new laws are enacted into national legislation. The Constitution vests this function in both Houses of Parliament. This means that, in order to become law, a bill must be passed by both Houses in the same text.
The Constitution envisages two types of laws: constitutional amendment laws, which may either amend existing articles of the Constitution or introduce new ones, and ordinary laws, which regulate the life of the community. These two types of laws follow different procedures in terms of their passage through Parliament and their ranking in the legal system.

A constitutional amendment law ranks higher than an ordinary law or other acts having the force of law [i.e. delegated legislation and decree-laws].

A draft law is known as a bill. Under the Constitution, a bill may be introduced by any member of Parliament, the Government, the people [in which case, the bill must be signed by no less than fifty thousand voters], a Regional Council, or the National Council of the Economy and Labour, for matters falling within its terms of reference.
A bill must have a title, an explanatory report and a regulatory part divided into sections. The Senate provides drafting services to senators to help them to appropriately word a bill.
The introduction of a bill is announced by the President before the Senate and the bill is then printed for distribution. The President decides to which Standing Committee the bill should be referred for consideration, informing the Senate.
The Standing Committee to which a bill is referred may consider the bill:

• in a reporting capacity, in which case the bill is debated in the Committee which may propose amendments before returning it to the Senate for further debate and a vote;
• in a drafting capacity, in which case the Committee votes on individual sections of the bill before returning it to the Senate for the final vote on the whole measure, to be preceded by a session at which the Parliamentary Groups explain how they intend to vote on the measure;
• in a legislative capacity, in which case the bill is either rejected or adopted in the Committee, which votes on it article by article before the final vote is taken on the whole bill.

A bill may also be referred to a Committee for an opinion providing guidelines to the Committee to which the bill has been referred for consideration: in this case, the Committee sits in an advisory capacity.
When a bill has been considered by a Committee in a reporting capacity, the rapporteur makes a written report [or oral, in case of urgency] to the Senate. A general debate is then held on the bill, which is concluded by the remarks of the rapporteur and the representative of the Government. After the general debate, each section of the bill is considered separately: amendments to the section and then the whole section are put to the vote. When this process is over, a vote is held on the whole bill.
After a bill has been passed, the Senate staff prepare the so-called "message": the bill, as passed by the Senate, is signed by the President and sent to the Chamber of Deputies. A bill that has already been passed by the Chamber and has been approved by the Senate without any amendments is sent to the President of the Republic for promulgation and publication in the Official Gazette.
In order for a bill to become a national law, it must therefore be passed by both Houses of Parliament in the same text. If a bill passed by one House is amended in the other, it is referred back to the House that first passed it.

Under the Constitution, the procedures for the passage of a Constitutional Amendment Law and an Ordinary Law differ as follows:

• the Standing Committee having jurisdiction over the subject matter considers the bill in a reporting capacity;
• a constitutional amendment bill must be passed a second time by each House after no less than three months from its first passage [this is known as 'double reading'];
• in the second reading, such bill must receive at least an absolute majority of the members of each House;
• if a constitutional amendment bill is passed with a majority of less than two-thirds of the members of either House in the second reading, it is published in the Official Gazette but not promulgated and one-fifth of the members of either House, five-hundred thousand voters or five Regional Councils may request to hold a referendum on the bill within three months of publication. If the bill receives a two-thirds majority in both Houses, it is published in the Official Gazette and promulgated.

The Constitution requires the Government to enjoy the confidence of both Houses. Each House gives or withdraws confidence through a reasoned motion, which is put to a roll call vote. This requirement defines the role of Parliament in providing guidelines for Government policy. This is done primarily through a motion of confidence in the political programme proposed by the Government and later through motions, resolutions and recommendations.

The Government is accountable to Parliament, which performs its functions in this respect using various means. Any senator may put questions to the Government [in order to seek information or explanations on particular issues from the ministers responsible, or to learn which measures have been adopted or are planned to be introduced in relation to any issue] or interpellations [i.e. questions put to the Government regarding the motives or intentions underlying its conduct on matters of particular importance or general nature].
Investigations into matters of public interest may be conducted through purposefully esatablished Committees either in the Senate or jointly with the Chamber.
Such a Committee is vested with the same powers and subject to the same limitations as the courts. Information material and documents may be acquired by a Standing Committee through fact-finding enquiries. At the end of the enquiry, a final report may be adopted, which is then printed for distribution.

When a sitting is opened, the minutes of the previous sitting are read out for approval.
For the purposes of determining the presence of a quorum, the President reads out the names of senators on leave of absence or on official Senate mission (who may not exceed one tenth of the members of the Senate).
A leave of absence must be requested in writing to the President. The President shall then inform the Senate of the communications that concern it and shall announce the bills introduced in the Senate or referred to the committees.
The rapporteur, a senator appointed by his or her committee to refer a bill back to the Senate, introduces the general debate by submitting a written - or, in urgent cases, oral - report. A general discussion takes place on the bill, after which the rapporteur and the government take the floor.
After this, the bill is debated article by article, amendments are introduced and put to the vote and then the bill is ultimately adopted or rejected.
After all individual articles have been examined, the bill is voted upon in its entirety. In case of approval, the bill is signed by the President of the Senate and sent to the Chamber of Deputies. If the bill has already been passed by the other House and the Senate has not amended it, it is signed by the President of the Senate and sent to President of the Republic for promulgation, whereby the bill is enacted as law and published in the Official Gazette.
Therefore, in order to become a law of the Republic, a bill must be approved by both Houses of Parliament in the same wording. If one House amends a bill approved by the other, the Bill must be sent back again to the house that scrutinised and approved it first.

The first parliamentary reporting activity in Italy dates back to 8th May 1848: as early as the first sitting of what is known as the Subalpine Parliament (the first form of Italian Parliament), the importance of expeditious and accurate reporting was acknowledged: Prime Minister Cavour himself took personal care of the organisation of this service. At first, shorthand was used, mainly resorting to the then scant group of parliamentary journalists, until when, in 1880, a completely new specially designed machine allowing for the typing of all phonemes and syllables utterable in any language with maximum speed and accuracy was officially presented and introduced.

Since then, Parliament after Parliament, this tool has given constant and exact account of Italian parliamentary life at all stages until the present time.
The machine currently used is still based on mechanisms which do not differ much from those resorted to at the end of the 19th century, though state-of-the-art electronic technology has been applied so that, by means of computer-aided transcription, stenotypy notes are turned into written Italian in real time. The transcription software applied, actually, completely processes all data entered, and it also digitally records the spoken language, in synchronicity with the text transcripted by the computer, which allows for the immediate check of the words pronounced by each speaker.

The functions and potential of this software are numerous and in constant development: for instance, the possibility to send the transcription of stenotyped speeches, using a LAN or the Internet, to other PC's in real time or create subtitles for hearing-impairedpersons.
In addition, for some activities connected to summary reporting - in which case the stenotyping keyboard is not used - a specific voice-recognition software called Dragon naturally speaking, is used to transcript a person's oral words into an immediately readable text.

Moreover, each stenotypist has a digital recorder which guarantees computer digital recording as well as back-up recording, in the event of problems arising with the tools used, and a portable printer to put the text stenotyped with the keyboard on paper.

The Reports Office produces three kinds of documents: verbatim report, summary report and end-of-sitting communiqué.
The verbatim report contains, word by word, all that happens (dicta et acta) in the relevant sitting, subjected to only formal corrections.
The summary report gives a very concise account of what happens in the relevant sitting, which the verbatim report does fully.
The end-of-sitting communiqué even more concisely reports Plenary proceedings.
Since 15th September 1998, the Senate has been issuing a single publication containing both verbatim and summary reports, which are directly drawn up in their final form.

This publication also includes Annexes A and B, which, respectively, contain the texts under scrutiny and the policy-orientation and policy-monitoring documents submitted.
Since 2001, the page "I lavori del Senato" ('Senate business') on the Senate website has given access to the plenary sitting verbatim and summary reports produced during the sitting itself, as well as the collection of previous sitting reports. The on-linepublication of the current report while the sitting is under way, though just a draft requiring subsequent correction, has been a real challenge for our Office, as rapidity in publishing must not be to the detriment of accuracy of contents.

The stages of verbatim report production

The production of the plenary sitting verbatim report is divided into the following stages: stenotyping, transcription, revision, publication of the non-corrected draft report while the sitting is still under way, final publication.
At the stenotyping stage, stenotypists sit in the Plenary Hall and type all words spoken and facts happened (dicta and acta) during the sitting. In this activity 12 stenotypists, in turn, sit to type for 5 minutes.
Then the individual stenotypists involved in the sitting transcript the text, that is they draw up their part of the report. The report passages produced are subsequently collated and checked, then published on the Internet, as non-corrected draft verbatim report. A further check follows, after which the report becomes final and is published as such.

The transcription stage is a series of operations on the verbatim text resulting from the stenotyping notes - which allow for passing from the oral to the written form thereby producing the report - with the introduction of all further integral elements (basically what we call countenance - that is the description of facts happened during the sitting other than speeches: applauses, comments out of the microphone, laughs, gestures, etc -, procedure formulas, HTML links for its subsequent publication on the website).

Each speaker, before on-linepublication and not over 2 hours after the conclusion of his/her speech, may read the corresponding text and effect exclusively formal corrections.
The revision stage is the collation, check and co-ordination of the texts produced by the stenotypists who worked in the Plenary Hall.
After tag verification and indexation, the report is ready for on-linepublication, as a non-corrected draft verbatim report produced while the sitting is under way.
Before final publication, other operations are made: a general check and the co-ordination of the contents of the verbatim report with those of the annex and summary report. The resulting texts are published on-line, stored in a general text database and electronically sent to typography for their printing on paper.

The Italian Senate parliamentary records are available on the Senate website in HTML and/or PDF format.
Parliamentary records are published in different sections of the website, according to their nature. Verbatim and summary reports can be found in the Senate proceedingsarea (Lavori del Senato), while the texts of bills and non legislative documents are available in the Laws and Documents section(Leggi e documenti). The heading of each website page contains a link to a list of specific databases by type of document, and to the general search engine which enables users to search the whole website or sections of it by word or combination of words.

What follows is a description of the various types of documents and where they can be retrieved:

Plenary verbatim reports (Resoconti stenografici dell'Assemblea):

This publication, for each plenary sitting, includes, along with the verbatim report, the summary report, Annex A (containing the texts under scrutiny), Annex B (containing the texts of the motions, questions and interpellations submitted in the same sitting, if any), qualified voting tables, and what are called "announcements" of documents received by the Senate.

While a sitting is still under way, a draft verbatim report is drawn up in HTML format and published on-line within forty-five minutes after the end of each speech; the same report is published in its final corrected version within four hours after the end of the sitting (Lavori del Senato » Assemblea » Resoconto in corso di seduta).

The final version of the report is printed to be available by the next morning on paper and in PDF format.
The HMTL/PDF texts of all plenary sittings since the 13th Parliament (9th May 1996) are listed in chronological order on Lavori del Senato » Assemblea » Resoconti: elenco cronologico.
The texts of the sittings of previous Parliaments, starting from 16th May 1963, are available on the same page, but only in PDF-format.

- Search on HTML records (from 9th May 1996) (Ricerca nell'attività dell'Assemblea): searches by word on the whole record texts, on the indexes or specific sections of text chosen by the user. Search is possible for various terms of Parliament simultaneously.

Plenary Agenda (Ordine del giorno) and Business schedule (Calendario dei lavori):

In the section Lavori del Senato » Assemblea», the current and previous Agendas of all sittings of the parliamentary term are available (PDF-format).
The current Business Schedule (in general covering a two-week period) is only available in HTML format, with a link to the fact-sheets of the issues considered.

Committee summary reports (Resoconti sommari delle Commissioni):

In general, for Committee sittings only the summary report is drawn up.
Committee summary reports, like plenary sitting reports, are in HTML format, with links to the speakers' fact-sheets and documents under scrutiny. It is available on line, separately by Committee and in chronological order of sittings, in the section Lavori del Senato » Commissioni e Giunte » (name of Committee)» Resoconti sommari.

Two search engines are available:
- on HTML reports published after 1st July 2004.
- on the only-text version of Committee reports and agendas from the 13th Parliament (9th May 1996) onwards. Searches are possible on more than one Committee at a time.

As far as the PDF version is concerned, all summary reports of two-chamber Committees and Senate Standing Committees are printed in a daily publication called Bollettino. On the Committee section there is a direct link to the latest Bollettino and another to the chronological list from 1992 (Lavori del Senato » Commissioni e Giunte » Bollettini: elenco cronologico).

Committee verbatim reports (Resoconti stenografici delle Commissioni):

Verbatim reports are only drawn up when Committees act in a law-making or drafting capacity, for hearings and during the budgetary procedure. They are published separately and are only available in PDF format, starting from the 14th Parliament (2001), in individual Committee sections.

Bills (Disegni di legge):

Starting from the 13th Parliament (9th May 1996), the texts of bills printed by the Senate, along with Committee reports, are available both in PDF and HTML format.These texts, as well as the data referring to the relevant debates, can be searched from the page Home » Leggi e documenti »Disegni di legge or Home » Banche dati » Progetti di legge.

- Ricerca nei testi dei progetti di legge (only Senate): searches by words contained in HTML texts, also possible for more that one parliamentary term at a time.

- Ricerca semplice and Ricerca avanzata: searches on the fact-sheet associated to each stage, or reading, of a bill (for both Senate and Chamber of Deputies). Fact-sheets contain: number, title, signers, type, current stage, previous or subsequent stages in the other House, data regarding submission and referral to Committees, rapporteurs' names, data concerning the relevant debates (Committees and Plenary), speakers' names, procedural elements, classification by subject).

The fact-sheet section Testi ed emendamenti contains the bill in its original wording and the texts developed during scrutiny (Committee report, text adopted, amendment texts and votes).

Verbatim reports of plenary sittings and summary Committee reports are directly linked on the bill fact-sheet (Senate only); debates relating to bills under scrutiny in the Chamber of Deputies are also linked through the Scheda Camera Lavori Preparatori.

For Senate bills only, there is a link to the documentation dossiers prepared by the Senate documentation departments.

Finally, Votazioni reports the outcome of electronic voting on the bill searched, specifying all individual Senators' votes.

- 1979-1996bills (Ricerca nelle schede dei progetti di legge delle legislature precedenti): only a basic fact-sheet is available, without texts.

- Amendments (Ricerca negli emendamenti e negli ordini del giorno di Assemblea e Commissione): from the 14th and 15th parliamentary term, for plenary and Committee sittings respectively, search is possible by word on the full text of amendments and motions connected to the bills discussed in the Senate or by bill number, first signer, final outcome.

Control and policy-setting documents:

The texts of control and policy-setting documents can be found attached to plenary verbatim reports. In particular, the texts of motions, questions and interpellations are published in Annex B when they are submitted to the House, whereas resolutions and other documents introduced during the discussion are published in Annex A of the report of the sitting when they are discussed.

A specific periodical publication, Fascicolo delle rispostescritte, publishes the written answers to questions given by Government over a period of two weeks. It can be found on the Intranet in PDF format only.

Search of texts and procedural stages of these documents is nevertheless possible using two engines:

- from 5th July 1976, on the Chamber of Deputies website, advanced search on texts and procedural stages of Senate and Chamber records;

- from 30th May 2001, full text search on Senate records only.

Non Legislative Documents

Documents of various nature, not always strictly connected to the legislative process, are traditionally included among parliamentary records. They are divided into groups by type and have Roman notation. Some of them are drafted by individual Senators (for instance, proposals to amend the Rules of Procedure or establish Investigation Committees), some by Senate bodies (the draft Senate budget, the final documents of Committee fact-finding enquiries, resolutions adopted by Committees on preparatory documents concerning EU legislation, or the final reports of Parliamentary Investigation Committees); some are sent to the Senate by other institutions (Presidency of the Republic, Government, Authorities, EU bodies, judicial authority, etc.).

Texts are available in PDF format (from 9th May 1996) and access to the relevant lists is possible through Leggi e documenti » Attività non legislative » Elenco documenti.For each document, like bills, there is a fact-sheet displaying information on the procedural stage with links to the relevant debates. Two kinds of search are therefore possible on non-legislative documents

- Ricerca avanzata documenti e procedure nonlegislative: advanced search of non-legislative documents and procedures, with links to the relevant texts;

- Ricerca per parola sui testi PDF dei documenti: search by word on PDF texts.

The Senate electronic Archives

In September 2003, a document processing system (Hummingbird DM5) was introduced to manage parliamentary records with a view to optimising document distribution among internal users and minimising publishing on paper, thereby saving space and reducing costs. A digital text (in optimised and protected PDF format) for each document is directly sent by the typography to the Legislative Archives, it is checked and classified, then finally validated and stored on a dedicated server.

The electronic Archives of texts are fully accessible on the Intranet. The parliamentary records published daily are available for external consultation on a special page of the website, Gli ultimi atti stampati ('The most recently printed documents'), in the sectionLeggi e documenti, updated during the day and kept on line for a week, where it is possible to read, unload and print such documents. A special link connects to the amendments under scrutiny by the full House.
At present, the electronic Archives of texts contain all parliamentary records starting from the 11th Parliament (23rd April 1992).

As far as parliamentary documents of the 1948-1992 period are concerned, a project for their digitisation is currently under way; by the end of the year, the whole series of plenary sitting reports will be available.