the intestato is due to the fact that at the top of any request, claim, summons etc filed with a court in Italy, the name of the court is put at the top of the first page - the intestazione. When the court is referred to later in teh document, it may thus be called the tribunale intestato. A literal translation would sound strange, so you need something generic
gets 89,000 hits too, many of which are relevant:
http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=it&q="court appealed to&aq=f&oq=...
of course, appeal is used here in a general sense
applied to gets even more hits (over 1,000,000), but of course many are not relevant because applied is often used as an active verb rather than a past participle:
http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=it&q="court applied to&start=10&...

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Note added at 2 hrs (2009-12-03 08:37:24 GMT)
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of course, you could simplify matters even further, by simply saying 'the Court' or 'the Court of Venice'. The 'intestato', all things considered, is fairly superfluous