Italian Citizenship by Descent After the 2025 Reform: What Actually Changed, and Whether Your Line Still Works
Published July 2026 · Facts verified as of August 24th, 2026. This area of law is moving quickly — this article is updated as it does.
If you've been told you qualify for Italian citizenship through a great-grandparent, most of what you read when you first looked into it is now wrong. In 2025 Italy rewrote the law of citizenship by descent, in 2026 its Constitutional Court upheld the rewrite, and just days ago its Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling that headlines are calling a victory for the diaspora — a description that is true for some families and misleading for others.
This article gives you the honest version: what changed, what the courts have done since, what the July 2026 ruling actually means, and how to tell — at the level of your own family line — where you stand.
The law that changed everything
For over a century, Italian citizenship passed by blood with no generational limit. If you could document an unbroken chain from an Italian-born ancestor down to yourself — even a great-great-grandparent who emigrated in the 1890s — you could be recognized as Italian from birth. Millions of Americans qualified, and in recent years hundreds of thousands pursued it.
That era ended in the spring of 2025. A decree issued in late March, converted that May into Law No. 74/2025, added a new provision — Article 3-bis — to Italy's citizenship statute. Its architecture is unusual and worth understanding literally: the law does not simply close the door going forward. It declares that, for anyone born abroad with another citizenship, the door was never open — then lists the narrow circumstances in which it was.
Four conditions matter in practice. The first is procedural, and for many families it is the one that decided everything: a formal application for recognition of citizenship — the riconoscimento procedure, filed with an Italian consulate abroad or with the comune if resident in Italy — had already been lodged, with the complete supporting documentation, by 23:59 Rome time on March 27, 2025. Not decided by that date; filed by it. (A parallel clause covers cases already brought before the courts.)
The other three are genealogical. A parent — an ascendant of the first degree — was an Italian citizen born in Italy. Or a grandparent — an ascendant of the second degree — was an Italian citizen born in Italy. Or a parent who was already an Italian citizen was legally resident in Italy for at least two continuous years after acquiring that citizenship and before the child's birth. That last clause is narrow and frequently misdescribed — it does nothing for a foreign parent who simply lived in Italy; the parent must hold Italian citizenship first, and the residence must fall in the window between acquisition and the birth.
Strip away the mechanics and the effect is what matters: for anyone who did not file before the cutoff, the Italian link now has to be close. Either a parent or grandparent born in Italy, or a parent who holds Italian citizenship however acquired and lived in Italy for two continuous years after acquiring it and before the birth. An ancestor further back no longer carries the claim: the open-ended route through a great-grandparent or beyond, the one most Italian-American families were counting on, is closed to new applicants. If your family filed before the cutoff, almost nothing in this article threatens your case — and the newest ruling, below, may actively help it.
What the courts have done since
The reform was immediately challenged, and 2026 has been the year of answers.
The Constitutional Court upheld the law. In March 2026, Italy's Constitutional Court announced that the challenges to the reform were partly unfounded and partly inadmissible, upholding the generational limit and the March 27 cutoff (the full judgment, No. 63/2026, followed in the spring). The Court framed citizenship by descent as a right that becomes effective upon formal recognition — a reframing designed to answer the retroactivity objection — and it confirmed that the new limits do not reach judicial cases filed before the cutoff. Anyone hoping the reform would simply be struck down should stop waiting for that outcome. It wasn't, and it won't be on constitutional grounds.
But the Court sent a question to Europe. On July 23, 2026, the Constitutional Court referred related questions about the reform to the Court of Justice of the European Union. Because Italian citizenship is also EU citizenship, the argument runs, its loss or denial has a European dimension that Luxembourg may weigh in on. This is a genuine open front — but it is a slow one, and no serious plan should be built on the assumption that the CJEU will undo the generational limit. It might. Planning on it is speculation, not strategy.
And then, days ago, the Supreme Court resolved the "minor issue." On July 26, 2026, the Sezioni Unite of the Corte di Cassazione — the highest and most authoritative formation of Italy's supreme court — published Judgment No. 24045/2026, resolving a question that had quietly wrecked thousands of cases.
The minor issue, and why the July 2026 ruling matters
Here is the problem the Court resolved. The classic Italian-American chain runs through an ancestor who emigrated, had children in the United States, and then naturalized as American. Under the old law, naturalizing meant losing Italian citizenship. The contested question was what happened to that ancestor's children — born in the US, therefore American by birthplace and Italian by blood — when the parent naturalized while they were still minors. Did the children lose their Italian citizenship too, severing the chain for every generation after them?
For roughly a century, the settled answer was no. Then, starting around 2023–2024, the Interior Ministry and some courts adopted the opposite reading, and a ministerial circular of October 2024 instructed consulates to reject these cases. Families who had spent years and thousands of dollars assembling documents were suddenly told their chain had been broken all along. This — the "minor issue" — is what the Sezioni Unite have now ended.
The ruling could not be clearer: a child who was a dual citizen from birth — Italian by descent, American (or Venezuelan, or Argentine) by birthplace — did not lose Italian citizenship when a parent later naturalized during the child's minority. The chain held. The Court reaffirmed it days later in companion decisions, and it anchored the result in a principle worth quoting in spirit: citizenship by descent is acquired at birth and can be asserted at any time.
Now the honest part. Now the honest part. This ruling restores the traditional rule for cases governed by the old law. What it does not do matters just as much: it does not touch the generational limit. If you never filed before March 27, 2025 and your nearest Italian-born ancestor is a great-grandparent, Judgment 24045/2026 does not reopen your claim. The two-generation ceiling stands, upheld by the Constitutional Court.
The administration followed quickly. On 10 August 2026 the Interior Ministry issued Circular Prot. 0065050, retiring its October 2024 instruction and directing its network to apply the Court's reading. It does more than settle future cases: an application already refused on minor-issue grounds can be reconsidered by the office that refused it, without a court case and without rebuilding the file — and where it was filed by 27 March 2025, it is re-examined under the rules in force then, so the 2025 generational limit does not reach it. The circular went to the prefectures and comuni; the Foreign Ministry was only copied, so consulates are implementing it at their own speed.
Who it genuinely helps: families whose cases were filed before the cutoff and whose chain runs through a minor-issue profile — many headed for rejection and now headed for recognition; families already refused on that ground, who can ask for the file to be looked at again; and some families applying under the new rules whose qualifying parent or grandparent's own citizenship depended on surviving a minor-issue break in the generation above.
So: does your line still work?
Every family is different, but the triage now runs in a clear order.
If your family filed — administratively or in court — before March 27, 2025, your case proceeds under the old rules, generational limit and all. If it involves a minor-issue profile, the July ruling is the best news you could have received. Make sure whoever is handling your case is putting Judgment 24045/2026 at the center of it.
If a parent or grandparent of yours was born in Italy — or if a parent holds Italian citizenship and was legally resident in Italy for two continuous years after acquiring it and before you were born — you are the applicant the new law still admits. Your questions are now practical rather than existential: whether the chain to that ancestor is intact (this is where the minor-issue ruling can repair what looked broken), whether the specific conditions of Article 3-bis are met in your case, which documents each generation requires, and which route — consulate, comune, or court — fits your situation. This determination is genuinely legal and genuinely fact-specific; it is exactly the question to put to a qualified attorney before you spend money on anything else.
If your nearest ancestor born in Italy is a great-grandparent or beyond, no parent of yours holds Italian citizenship, and you never filed, the administrative door is closed, and honesty requires saying so plainly. The remaining paths are real but different in kind: litigation strategies in the Italian courts that test the reform's edges (a developing and uncertain battleground, made marginally more interesting by the CJEU referral); and the alternatives Italy built into the reform itself. Those alternatives deserve more attention than they get. Parents who are recognized Italian citizens can declare citizenship for their minor children — a window now extended to May 31, 2029. Former Italian citizens who lost citizenship by naturalizing can reacquire it through a window open until July 1, 2027 — which, in some families, rebuilds a live chain one generation up. Descendants also have access to a shortened residency route to naturalization and to dedicated work-visa pathways with no generational limit. For many families the realistic question is no longer "do I qualify as of right" but "which of these doors is actually open to us" — and that has a concrete, discoverable answer.
What we'd tell a family member
Three things. First, distrust anything you read about this topic that isn't dated: the law changed in 2025, the courts have reshaped it three times in 2026, and most of the internet hasn't caught up. Second, get an honest read on your specific line before spending serious money — the most expensive mistake in this field is pursuing a claim that closed, and the second most expensive is abandoning one that the July 2026 ruling just revived. Third, if your line works, the next few years — while the centralized procedures settle, the consulates absorb the August circular, and the CJEU question runs its course — are the window in which clarity is worth the most.
This article is orientation, not legal advice, and no article can determine your eligibility — that is a fact-specific legal call that belongs with a qualified Italian citizenship attorney. At Galanti Bridge we map family lines honestly, tell you when a claim is closed, and leave the legal determinations to our Italian attorney who handles citizenship and cross-border matters. If you want a straight answer on your own line, that's what our Citizenship by Descent services are for.