Citizenship and heritage

The 2025 reform closed most claims. In July 2026 the Supreme Court reopened some of them, and in August the Interior Ministry told the offices in Italy to follow. We'll tell you honestly where yours stands — before you spend years and thousands of dollars finding out.

If you have looked into Italian citizenship by descent in the last year, you have almost certainly read something that is no longer true.

For decades the promise was extraordinary: an Italian great-grandparent, an unbroken line, and an EU passport at the end of it. Millions of Americans qualified. An entire industry grew up around that promise — and much of it is still selling it. In 2025 Italy rewrote the rules, and in 2026 the Constitutional Court upheld the change in Judgment 63/2026, and has since sent a related question to the EU Court of Justice. The open-ended great-grandparent claim is largely closed to new applicants. The blogs, the Facebook groups, the agencies with the old landing pages, and the cousin who got his in 2019 are all describing a system that no longer exists.

Which means the expensive mistake has changed shape. It used to be pursuing a valid claim badly — the wrong documents, the wrong route, a naturalization date nobody checked. Now the expensive mistake is spending eighteen months pursuing a claim that closed, on the strength of advice written before the law moved.

And the things that quietly break a line are still there underneath the new rules: an ancestor who naturalized as an American a few months too early, the pre-1948 rule where the line passes through a female ancestor. Either one ends a claim that looks perfect on a family tree.

But the movement runs both ways. A third rule of the same kind, one that had been killing claims since 2024, went the other way in 2026. Since 2024, a line of decisions had held that a child lost Italian citizenship if their parent naturalized during the child's minority — a reading that killed a great many otherwise valid claims. On 26 July 2026 the Supreme Court's Joint Sections reversed it, and on 10 August the Interior Ministry retired its 2024 instruction and told the offices inside Italy to follow the Court. An application already refused on that ground can now be reconsidered by the office that refused it — no court case, no rebuilding the file — and where it was filed by 27 March 2025 it is judged under the rules in force then, not the 2025 limits. It does not touch the generational limit. But if your line was blocked on the minor issue, this is worth revisiting. And consulates answer to a different ministry, so if you applied from the US, whether your consulate is acting on this yet is a live question rather than a settled one — the kind that gets answered by reading the file and calling the office in Italian, not by reading a page like this one. Most published guidance has caught up on none of it.

Which is why what you need here isn't another summary of the law. It's someone reading it as it moves, who can tell you what it does to your particular line.

That's us: a US firm, US contracts, run by a dual US–Italian citizen who works across both countries constantly, reads the Italian records natively, and works alongside an Italian attorney — admitted to the Milan Bar in 1994, well versed in international law — who makes the legal calls. We would rather tell you in the first thirty minutes that your line is closed than take your money for two years and tell you at the end.

Two questions people arrive with

"Can I get the passport?" A legal question with a factual answer, and the answer moved twice in eighteen months — restricted in one direction, reopened in another. What you need is a current, honest read on your specific line before you commit anything to it.

"Where do I actually come from?" A different question entirely, and one that doesn't depend on a law changing. Most Americans of Italian descent know a region, a surname, and a handful of half-remembered stories. The actual town is findable. So is the line, the migration, and the dialect your grandparents spoke.

They connect more often than people expect. The research that answers the second question is frequently what answers the first — the naturalization record that tells you your family's story is the same document a citizenship claim turns on. So if you start on the heritage side and a claim surfaces, the research carries over and you are not charged for it twice.

If the question is the passport

1 · Understand how it works

Five 50-minute sessions plus a scoping call. The landscape after the reform — what actually changed, what the law now requires, and the cutoff date that protects applications already in progress. Then your eligibility in depth: the unbroken chain and the specific things that break it, plus the new closeness requirement, read against the current state of the case law rather than last year's. Then documents and the pitfalls that sink applications — what you need for each generation, the certified-apostilled-translated standard, and the naturalization dates, anglicized names and missing records that undo people. Then the routes, the real costs, and an honest read on timelines. Then, if descent doesn't work, the genuine alternatives — including the fast-track available to those with an Italian parent or grandparent by birth.

Premium adds a session built around your specific line and a 3–5 page roadmap: an eligibility triage with the exact questions to put to a lawyer, a per-generation document checklist, the recommended route, and your alternatives.

From $800 · Premium from $1,500

Choose this if you want to genuinely understand the subject — because you have several lines to consider, relatives asking, or a decision you'd rather make from knowledge than from someone else's summary.

2 · Get an honest read on your line

Tailored sessions over about four to six weeks, built entirely around your family, ending in your Eligibility and Roadmap Dossier.

We build your line generation by generation — names, dates, places, and the one fact that usually decides everything: when and whether your ancestor became American. We apply the law as it now stands to that specific line and tell you where you stand, with every genuinely open question marked for a lawyer rather than guessed at. We map your documents line by line: which record, from which office, in what form, and the discrepancies caught before they cost you. And we recommend your route — consulate, an Italian comune, or the courts — with the reasoning, a realistic cost and timeline, and a straight answer on why the next couple of years may be the window.

From $2,500 · $3,500 with a real eligibility read from our attorney, coordinating with Italian counsel where needed.

The bundle teaches you the subject; this goes straight to your line and produces the working document. If you've done the bundle, we credit its personalized portion toward the sprint.

Choose this if you're ready to act and what you need is your own answer, in writing, that you can hand to a lawyer or act on immediately.

3 · Have us build and file the case

The Citizenship by Descent Project. Our flagship engagement, and the one where our attorney is not an add-on but a co-deliverer: he provides the formal legal eligibility opinion, and we handle the document assembly and the recognition or court process alongside you. Typically twelve to twenty-four months, milestone-billed against our deliverables — never against a consulate's or a court's calendar, because those are nobody's to promise.

$8,000–12,000. Third-party costs — records, apostilles, sworn translations, court and consular fees — billed at cost with no markup.

Choose this if the claim is viable and you want it carried, by people who will do the chasing in Italian.

Not sure the claim exists at all

Every rung above assumes there's something to pursue. Often the honest first question is smaller: does this line survive the current rules? A naturalization date a few months either side of a birth, a woman in the line before 1948, a minor-issue question that reversed last month — any one of them decides it, and none of them can be settled from a family tree.

The Line Viability Read gives you a straight read in writing. You send us what you know — names, dates, whatever documents exist. We talk for forty minutes. About a week later you have one to two pages: your line as we map it, a verdict of likely viable, likely not, or cannot be determined without these specific records, the reasoning behind it, and if something's still open, exactly which document would close it and where to request it.

If the likely answer is no, you've found that out in a week rather than in year two — which is the outcome we'd rather deliver than watch someone chase a claim that closed.

$500, credited in full against anything you go on to do with us.

If the question is where you come from

4 · Find your ancestral town

A few tailored sessions over four to eight weeks with dedicated research between them, ending in your Heritage Dossier — a keepsake record you can hold, frame, and hand down.

Not "somewhere in Sicily." The actual comune your family left, pinpointed from immigration, naturalization and church records, so your heritage becomes a place you can stand in. Then your line traced back through American and Italian records — manifests, census, and the civil and parish registers of your town — as far as the records reach. Then the story told properly: who left, when, from where, and why, woven together with the history, dialect, food and character of the region they came from. And finally, where to go next — how to visit, how to go deeper, and whether your line suggests a citizenship claim worth exploring.

From $1,500 (Origins — your town and your immigrant ancestors) · from $2,500 (Deep Lineage — traced back through the generations as the records allow)

Choose this if "we're Italian" has never been specific enough, and you want a place, a line, and a story instead of a vague inheritance.

Many people arrive at heritage research through curiosity rather than genealogy. If what you want first is to understand the civilization your family came from — the history, the regions, the language and the dialects, the food, and the Italian-American story — that's our Italian Cultural Deep Dive: eight unhurried conversations, from $1,500. It pairs naturally with the research, and either order works. For more information, see our Cultural Deep Dive service page.

Choose this if there's no paperwork you want and no claim you're chasing — you simply want to understand the civilization behind the postcard, with someone trained in philosophy who loves this material.

The Legal Layer — Add a session with our Italian attorney, plus a one-page written summary of where you stand and what to do next. He was admitted to the Milan Bar in 1994, and his practice covers citizenship by descent, contract law, and relocation for foreigners moving to Italy. Focused here on a real read on your specific family line and the legal questions it raises. And because a claim stands or falls on records, there's a deeper option that adds his review of your actual documents, with a written legal opinion. From $500

Where this leads — Moving and Living in Italy if recognition changes what's possible for you, since an Italian passport removes the visa question entirely · Buying Property in Italy · and in the other direction, the Heritage Dossier is frequently where a citizenship claim is first discovered.

What this isn't — whether you qualify is a fact-specific legal determination, and we don't make it. We map your line, apply the current rules honestly, and put the legal call where it belongs: with our attorney and, where needed, qualified Italian counsel. We don't guarantee recognition, and no one honestly can. On the heritage side we don't guarantee how far back we'll reach — genealogy depends on which records survived — and if a line runs into a wall we'll tell you plainly and deliver the story we did find. Citizenship law and the litigation around it are moving quickly — it has shifted twice since early 2025 — and we verify the current position before every engagement rather than repeating what was true last year.

Not sure where to start? Thirty minutes on a call to talk through your family, your options, and which of the above actually fits. If something's obviously wrong with the line, we'll say so on the call — but a real answer needs the records, and that's the Line Viability Read.