For 160 years, the rule was simple: born to an Italian citizen, you are an Italian citizen. On March 12, 2026, Italy's Constitutional Court ended that era. Here is what happened, what it means, and, if your window is still open, what to do right now.
I want to be direct with you because a lot of people are getting vague or evasive answers on this right now. The news is not good for everyone. But it is not as final as some headlines are making it sound, and there are still real paths forward depending on your situation. The key is understanding exactly where you stand.
What Italy Actually Changed
In March 2025, the Italian government issued an emergency decree, Decree Law 36/2025, quickly converted into Law 74/2025, that fundamentally restructured how Italian citizenship by descent works. The law introduced a two generation limit on automatic transmission of citizenship.
Under the old system, which had been in place since Italy became a unified country in 1861, citizenship could be traced back through any number of generations as long as it was never broken. Your great great-great grandfather could have left Calabria in 1890 and, if the line was unbroken, you had a legitimate claim to Italian citizenship today.
Under the new law, only people with a parent or grandparent born in Italy can claim citizenship by descent. The Italian government also effectively shut the door on dual citizenship for most diaspora applicants, requiring that qualifying parent or grandparent to have held solely Italian citizenship at the time of the descendant's birth.
The hard reality
If your nearest Italian born ancestor is a great grandparent or further back, and you did not file your application before March 27, 2025, the new law blocks your claim under the traditional jure sanguinis route.
This affects an estimated several million Italian Americans alone, the vast majority of people who have been researching this process.
March 12, 2026: The Court Confirms It
Many people were hoping Italy's Constitutional Court would strike the new law down as unconstitutional. After all, it was overturning 160 years of established legal principle virtually overnight. Four judges challenged it. A professor of law at Bologna University, Corrado Caruso, argued the case publicly.
On March 12, 2026, the court issued its decision. It upheld the law.
The court ruled that there is no constitutional right to unlimited transmission of citizenship, and that Parliament has broad discretion in defining citizenship criteria. The constitutional challenges were declared partly inadmissible and partly unfounded.
"It was an extremely clear, harsh intervention. I had a hope that it would be judged in breach of some constitutional points, but that wasn't recognized by the court."
That quote is from Professor Caruso, speaking to CNN after the decision. He is not a pessimist. He is one of the sharpest legal minds working on this issue. When he describes the ruling as "harsh," that matters.
The ruling cannot be appealed. It is final as far as the Constitutional Court is concerned. What remains open is a separate hearing at Italy's Court of Cassation, its highest legal authority, where further arguments are being made. But no one I trust in the legal community is telling people to wait and bank on that overturning things.
Who Is Still Protected
This is the part that gets lost in the alarming headlines, so I want to be precise here. Several categories of people are either fully protected or operating under different rules entirely.
| Situation | Status Under New Law |
|---|---|
| Application filed before March 27, 2025 at 11:59 PM Rome time | ✓ Fully Protected, old rules apply |
| Parent or grandparent born in Italy (any generation) | ✓ Still Eligible, two generation rule met |
| Descent through a female ancestor before 1948 (1948 rule) | ✓ Fully Open, unaffected by new law |
| Already a recognised Italian citizen | ✓ Your citizenship is not affected |
| Great grandparent or beyond, application after March 27, 2025 | ✗ Blocked under new law |
Approximately 60,000 applications filed before the March 2025 deadline are protected. Those cases continue under the previous, unlimited generation rules. If you were one of them, your path forward is unchanged. It just may be slow.
The 1948 Rule Is Completely Unaffected
This is important and underreported. The 1948 rule, which covers cases where the line of Italian descent passes through a woman who gave birth before January 1, 1948, a period when Italian women could not legally transmit citizenship, is completely unaffected by Law 74/2025. See the full breakdown. It has no generational limit. It remains fully open.
These cases require a civil court proceeding in Italy rather than a consulate application, and they are more complex. But they are very much alive. If your ancestry goes through a female line before 1948, do not assume the new law has blocked you. It has not.
That said, these cases require careful handling. A poorly prepared petition can be rejected outright, and once that happens, your ability to refile is severely limited. This is not the process to approach without proper guidance.
Do you qualify through the 1948 rule?
If your line of Italian descent passes through a female ancestor, a grandmother, great grandmother, or beyond, who gave birth before 1948, your claim may be completely unaffected by the new law. It is worth a careful look at your family tree before you conclude the door is shut.
What This Means If You Have Not Filed Yet
If your Italian ancestor is a great grandparent or further back, and you did not file before the March 2025 deadline, your path under traditional jure sanguinis is blocked for now. I am not going to sugarcoat that.
What I will say is this: the legal fight is not entirely over. There are further hearings pending at the Court of Cassation, and there is a growing body of opinion that the case may eventually reach EU courts, where a different result is possible. Marco Mellone, one of the citizenship lawyers who spoke to CNN after the March ruling, put it plainly: "While the battle is lost, the war is not."
My honest advice is not to sit and wait. If you have any connection to Italy, a grandparent, a parent, or a female line before 1948, find out now whether a pathway still exists for you. A 10 minute conversation can tell you whether you have a genuine claim, what it would take, and whether it is worth pursuing.
What I have seen too often in this space is people spending years and thousands of euros on a case that had the wrong strategy from the start. The new law makes it even more important to understand your situation precisely before spending anything.
Why Italy Did This
To understand the change, it helps to understand what was happening. Between 2014 and 2024, the number of Italians registered as living abroad grew from 4.6 million to 6.4 million. Argentina's Italian consulates alone processed 30,000 applications in 2024, up 10,000 from the previous year. Italy's regional courts were clogged with citizenship cases. Consulate waiting lists in some cities stretched to ten years.
The government's position, ultimately accepted by the court, was that descendants many generations removed have a "fictitious link" with Italy. That they had not officially claimed citizenship by 2025, and therefore had an expectation of citizenship rather than a right to it.
The irony is brutal. The very backlog that prevented people from filing in time, consulate waitlists stretching years into the future, was itself created by the overwhelming volume of applications Italy was struggling to process. And now the law uses the absence of a filed application as evidence that the connection is too remote. It is a Catch-22 that has frustrated a lot of legitimate claimants.
Where Things Stand Right Now
Updated September 2026
The Constitutional Court deposited its full written ruling on April 30, 2026 (Sentenza 63/2026), confirming that the two-generation limit is constitutional and applies retroactively. That part is now settled domestically. But it is not the end of the story: on July 23, 2026, the Constitutional Court itself stayed several related cases and referred a specific question to the Court of Justice of the European Union (Ordinanza 147/2026), asking whether EU citizenship rights prevent Italy from retroactively cutting off people who were born before the 2025 reform and would have qualified under the old rules. The law remains fully in force while that question is pending, and a CJEU answer is realistically 12 to 24 months away.
This is a fast moving legal situation and I am watching it closely from here in Naples. The domestic legal fight over the two-generation limit itself is settled for now. The Constitutional Court's ruling stands, and it is being applied. What remains open is narrower and more technical: whether retroactively applying it to people who were already eligible under the pre-2025 rules is compatible with EU law. That is now Europe's question to answer, not Italy's.
My recommendation: do not make any assumptions about what you do or do not qualify for based on headlines alone. The situation is genuinely complex, and the difference between a protected case and a blocked one can come down to a single document, a filing date, or which ancestor your line runs through.
One piece of separate, unambiguous good news: the "minor issue," a related but distinct problem that had wrongly blocked many parent-and-grandparent-line cases, not just great-grandparent ones, was definitively resolved in applicants' favor by Italy's Supreme Court on July 26, 2026 (Sezioni Unite, Sentenza 24045/2026), and the Interior Ministry issued an implementing circular on August 10, 2026 telling consulates and comuni to apply it. If you were told your case was blocked because a parent naturalized while you were a minor, that is worth revisiting. See the full breakdown for what changed and how to request re-examination without filing a new application.
If you have Italian heritage and you have not already looked into this seriously, now is the time. Not to panic, but to get clarity on where you actually stand.
Find out where you actually stand.
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