Carriage Performed by Successive Carriers or Sub-Transport: Tertium non Datur

In a world now dominated by the multiplication of types of relationships and agreements between operators in the transport sector, often necessary to adequately respond to clients’ needs, legislators and Courts have to chase a reality that is rapidly and constantly evolving, regulating or judging increasingly complex phenomena, which show more and more nuanced differences between them. In this panorama, it should not be forgotten that the presence of a special discipline is justified precisely by the peculiarities of a given factispecies, otherwise there is the risk of applying the rules of one contractual type to another that is only apparently similar. In this paper, therefore, a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon is examined, highlighting the critical issues inherent in the possible choice of applying the discipline regulating transport with subsequent carriers also to transport with sub-transport.