Italy Passport Photo Size & Requirements

Official Questura (provincial police headquarters) passport-photo pages, published in identical wording across questure.poliziadistato.it, state the size simply as "35-40 mm" — not a separate width-and-height pair, and notably not 35x45mm. That larger 35x45mm figure shows up on many third-party sites, and appears to describe the size some Italian consulates abroad ask for instead, following the general Schengen visa standard.

Applying at a Questura in Italy for your passport or carta d'identità? Use 35x40mm, the spec this tool is built to. Applying through an Italian consulate or embassy abroad? Confirm with that office first — it may want the 35x45mm size instead.

The same "formato tessera" requirements — 35x40mm, face covering 70-80% of the frame from chin to forehead, plain white background with even lighting — apply whether you're applying for an Italian passport or a carta d'identità (national ID card) in person at a Questura. One correctly cropped photo works for either application.

Italians rarely say “passport photo”. The phrase is foto formato tessera, and tessera means a card or a pass of any kind — a travel card, a membership card, a student card, an identity card. The same small photograph serves all of them, which is why every photo shop in Italy understands the request instantly and why the size predates the passport as a document category.

That breadth is useful when you are ordering prints, because asking for foto tessera gets you the right thing without a conversation about millimetres. It is less useful when you are trying to pin down a precise specification, because the term covers a family of related uses rather than one legally defined rectangle, and different sources inside that family quote slightly different numbers.

Note the 70 to 80 per cent figure is measured from the base of the chin to the forehead, which is what the Questura text says — not chin to the top of the head as most other countries measure. Those are different distances: the forehead stops at the hairline, the crown does not. Measured the Italian way, a correctly framed face lands between 28 and 32mm in a 40mm frame. The export here is 630 × 720 pixels.

The Questura guidance asks for the photo to be stampata su carta di alta qualità e ad alta definizione — printed on high-quality, high-definition paper. This is a rule about the physical print rather than the image, and it is reliably enforced at the counter.

An inkjet printout on ordinary paper is refused on sight. So, usually, is a print on cheap matte photo paper that has gone soft or developed a slight texture. Photographic paper from a lab, or a good glossy photo paper from a home photo printer, is what the requirement is describing. If you are printing at home and are unsure whether your paper qualifies, the cheaper and safer route is to take the file to a shop and have a single sheet of copies printed.

For a 35 × 40mm photo a standard 10 × 15cm print holds eight copies comfortably with cutting margins — more than enough for a passport application and the carta d’identità renewal you will probably need within the next few years. The print-sheet option under the download button lays them out for you.

This is the single most important distinction on this page, and it is worth restating plainly. The 35 × 40mm size documented here is what the Questura — the provincial police headquarters that processes passport and carta d’identità applications inside Italy — publishes nationwide in identical wording.

An Italian consulate or embassy abroad is a different office with a different workflow, and the widely repeated 35 × 45mm figure appears to describe what some of those offices ask for instead, following the general Schengen-style standard rather than the domestic formato tessera. Neither figure is wrong; they belong to different channels.

If you are applying abroad, the five minutes it takes to check the specific consulate’s own page or to send them an email is worth it, because the two sizes are different enough that a photo cut for one will be visibly wrong for the other. If you are applying at a Questura in Italy, the size on this page is the one the primary source states.