This paper endeavours to ascertain how Islamic banking may operate within the Italian legal system, given that neither the Rome I regulation, and the incorporation approach cannot be applied. There are three main research questions: i) which is the mainstream Western approach to Islamic banking?; ii) if Sharia rules are considered as a system of social rules and Islamic banking is compared to ethical banking or socially responsible banking, to which extent the Italian banking law is applicable to?; iii) can we suggest building up Sharia rules as a system of normative prescriptions?