The review of the legality of the arbitral award pursuant to Article 829(1) n. 4 of the Code of Civil Procedure is not limited to verifying the formal correspondence between the claims and the decision, but requires the arbitrators to rule on the entire thema decidendum submitted to them and not beyond its limits, being entitled to consider any aspect of the matter relevant to establishing whether and to what extent the claim asserted is well-founded, including by interpreting the substantive content of the claims beyond the literal expressions used by the parties.
The nullity of the arbitral award for inconsistency pursuant to Article 829(1) n. 11 of the Code of Civil Procedure arises exclusively when the contradiction emerges between the different components of the operative part of the award or between the reasoning and the operative part, whereas internal inconsistency between the different parts of the reasoning may be relevant as a defect of the award only where it renders it absolutely impossible to reconstruct the logical and legal reasoning underlying the decision due to the total absence of reasoning attributable to its functional model.
The public policy clause under Article 829(3) of the Code of Civil Procedure, as a ground for nullity of the arbitral award, must be interpreted restrictively as a reference limited to international public policy, understood as the body of fundamental and mandatory principles of the legal order derivable from the Constitution or in any event underpinning the entire legal system, to the exclusion of domestic public policy consisting of mandatory rules that limit the contractual autonomy of private parties.
In proceedings challenging an arbitral award, the review remains confined to a legality review that may never entail a re-examination of the facts of the case, not even by way of a review of the adequacy and consistency of the reasoning followed by the arbitrators.