Italian citizenship by descent, after Law 74/2025.

Before March 28, 2025, Italian citizenship by descent operated under Law 91/1992 — the framework that recognized unlimited generational transmission, provided that the line could be documented unbroken back to an Italian-born ancestor who was alive on or after March 17, 1861 (the date of Italian unification). That framework allowed great-grandparent and great-great-grandparent claims, made jus sanguinis the most permissive ancestry-citizenship regime in Europe, and produced backlogs at consulates that ran two and three years deep, particularly in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina.

Decree-Law No. 36/2025, issued by the Council of Ministers on March 28, 2025 and championed by Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, restructured the framework by inserting Article 3-bis into the citizenship code. The decree took immediate effect at 11:59 PM Rome time on March 27, 2025. Parliament had sixty days to convert it into ordinary law and did so on May 24, 2025 as Law No. 74/2025, with minor amendments preserving the core restrictions.

The structural change is direct and severe. Under Article 3-bis, an applicant born abroad who already holds another citizenship is considered never to have acquired Italian citizenship — even if their lineage would have qualified under the prior framework — unless they meet at least one of the statutory exceptions described below. The reform converts the prior automatic-by-bloodline transmission into a conditional regime that requires demonstrable proximity to Italy.

The Italian Constitutional Court reviewed the decree at a hearing held March 11, 2026, on referral from the Court of Turin. On March 12, 2026, the Court issued its press release: the constitutional challenges were declared partly unfounded and partly inadmissible. The Court reasoned that citizenship determinations fall within parliamentary competence and that the Constitution does not require the State to recognize Italian citizenship for all descendants without generational limit. Decree-Law 36/2025 and Law 74/2025 remain fully in force. The full written judgment is pending; further hearings on related challenges are scheduled through 2026, and the Court of Cassation is separately reviewing the related “minor issue” question, but the central restriction has been upheld.

Under Law 74/2025, an applicant born abroad qualifies for Italian citizenship by descent if at least one of the following applies. These are the only paths the administrative system now recognizes for new applications.

If your situation does not meet any of these paths, the administrative pathway under Law 74/2025 is closed. That does not necessarily end the analytical inquiry — the judicial pathway remains available in narrow categories of cases — but it does mean the standard consulate or municipality route will not produce a recognition.

The largest single category of Americans affected by Law 74/2025 is the descendants of Italian immigrants whose Italian-born ancestor is a great-grandparent or further back. Under the prior law, a documented unbroken lineage was sufficient. Under the new law, that lineage is no longer sufficient absent one of the four paths above.

In practical terms: an American whose Italian-born ancestor immigrated to the United States in the 1880s or 1890s, whose family integrated into American life across four or five generations, and who would have qualified under Law 91/1992 by tracing the unbroken chain back to that great-great-grandparent, no longer qualifies under the administrative framework. Filing such a claim after March 27, 2025 will result in an administrative rejection. The Constitutional Court ruled in March 2026 that this outcome does not violate the Italian Constitution.

This is the result the law was designed to produce. The reform's explicit objective was to limit citizenship to descendants with a “genuine link” to Italy — defined operationally as a parent or grandparent born in Italy, or two years of parental residency. Distant ancestral connection alone, without any of those proximate factors, was deemed by Parliament and the Constitutional Court not to constitute a genuine link warranting automatic citizenship.

For Americans in this category, the analytical question shifts. The relevant question is no longer “how do I document my lineage” — it is “is there an alternative pathway to Italian residency or EU optionality that fits my situation.” Italian residency by extended stay, Italian residency with the eventual option of naturalization, the structural alternative of Irish citizenship via the Foreign Births Register, or the broader Key Countries methodology are the appropriate next questions. The closed door on jus sanguinis is structurally important to acknowledge before time and money are committed to a pathway that no longer exists.

Five months before the Tajani Decree, the Italian Ministry of the Interior issued Circular No. 43347 on October 3, 2024 — a separate but related restriction often referred to as the “minor issue.” The circular clarified the Ministry's position that if an Italian-born ancestor naturalized as a citizen of another country while their child was still a minor, the line of citizenship transmission was broken at that moment — the minor child was deemed to have lost Italian citizenship simultaneously with the parent.

The interpretation disrupted citizenship chains in lineages where, for example, an Italian-born grandfather naturalized as a US citizen when his American-born son was eight years old. Under the prior practitioner consensus, the son retained Italian citizenship through unbroken bloodline transmission and the chain continued. Under the October 2024 circular, the chain broke at the moment of the father's naturalization, and the son — and all descendants — never validly held Italian citizenship.

The Italian Court of Cassation is currently reviewing whether the Ministry's interpretation is legally correct. The Court began evaluating three minor-issue test cases — two involving American families with three- and four-generation lineages, one involving a Venezuelan plaintiff — at a hearing in mid-April 2026. The Procuratore Generale's legal opinion submitted to the Cassazione panel was favorable to the plaintiffs and against the Ministry's restrictive reading. The court's ruling is pending and could materially modify which pre-2025 lineages still produce a valid claim under the grandfathered framework.

Practical implication: if your application was rejected on minor-issue grounds — or if your lineage involves a parental naturalization while the next-generation child was a minor — the case may be worth reviewing in light of the pending Cassazione ruling, particularly if the application was filed before the March 27, 2025 cutoff and would otherwise fall within the grandfathered cohort. The judicial pathway remains available for cases that meet the relevant criteria.

Italy's 1912 citizenship law did not recognize the right of female Italian citizens to transmit citizenship to their children if they gave birth before January 1, 1948 — the date the Italian Constitution took effect, establishing equality between men and women in matters of citizenship. Lineages traced exclusively through a maternal line in the pre-1948 period were excluded from the consulate pathway by the 1912 law and the implementing practice that followed it.

The Italian Court of Cassation ruled in 2009 that this gender-based exclusion was unconstitutional, opening the judicial pathway: pre-1948 maternal-line cases could proceed in Italian civil court rather than through the consulate. The 1948 case category remains a recognized judicial pathway under both the prior framework and Law 74/2025.

Important interaction with the new framework: a 1948 case routed through court must still satisfy Law 74/2025's generational limits if the application is filed after March 27, 2025. The pre-1948 maternal-line problem is a procedural correction (court vs. consulate) — it is not a generational exception. An applicant whose qualifying ancestor under the 1948 case framework is more remote than a grandparent born in Italy faces both the gender-based correction and the new generational limit, and the new generational limit governs unless the case was filed before the cutoff.

For lineages that qualify under the post-2025 framework, the document burden is similar in shape to the prior framework but smaller in volume — fewer generations means fewer documents. The core set: long-form birth certificates for the applicant and each generation in the lineage; marriage certificates for each marriage in the lineage; death certificates where applicable; the Italian-born ancestor's naturalization records (or evidence of non-naturalization) from US federal archives; and certified Italian-language translations of every non-Italian document. Italian civil registry documents must be obtained directly from the relevant municipalities. Every foreign-issued document requires apostille authentication.

For grandfathered cases under the prior unlimited-generation framework, the document set is larger — typically twenty to fifty documents covering three or more generations — and the document acquisition phase frequently exceeds the application processing phase in elapsed time. Locating ninety- or one-hundred-year-old Italian civil records, obtaining apostilled US documents, and assembling the chain of certificates is the work that takes most applicants longer than the consulate or court phase itself.

Obtaining Italian citizenship — whether through descent, naturalization, or any other pathway — does not by itself change US tax obligations. American citizens are taxed on worldwide income regardless of any other citizenship held. FBAR and FATCA reporting requirements apply to any foreign financial accounts regardless of dual citizenship status. Holding an Italian passport does not create new US tax exposure. It also does not, by itself, create new Italian tax exposure — Italian tax residency is a separate determination governed by physical-presence and center-of-vital-interests rules, not by citizenship status.

The tax architecture becomes substantial only when the new Italian citizen establishes Italian tax residency — typically by spending more than 183 days in Italy in a calendar year, or by making Italy the center of vital interests. At that point, the Italian special-regime analysis becomes relevant: the 7% retirees regime in qualifying southern municipalities; the €200,000 lump-sum HNWI substitute tax for foreign-source income; the impatriate regime for inbound workers; or the standard Italian rates for residents who do not qualify for any special regime. The relevant work is sequencing — addressing the US-side architecture, the Italian-side regime election, and the FBAR and FATCA position before establishing residency rather than after.

For a structural treatment of how the citizenship piece fits within the broader Italian residency project, see the Italy first foothold overview. For the cross-cutting sequencing framework that governs all such projects, see The Sequencing Discipline.

For lineages qualifying under the post-2025 framework — Italian-born parent or grandparent — the consulate pathway typically runs eighteen to thirty months from initial document gathering through recognition. Document acquisition is the largest variable. Consular wait times in major US jurisdictions have moderated somewhat as the volume of new applications dropped after the March 2025 reform, but appointment availability still varies considerably by consulate.

For grandfathered cases under the prior framework, processing timelines depend on where the case sits in the queue. Cases filed in the months immediately preceding the March 27, 2025 cutoff are now part of a substantial backlog being processed under the prior unlimited-generation rules. Practical timelines are long but the cases will be evaluated under the more permissive framework.

For judicial pathway cases — 1948 maternal-line, minor-issue rejections under the pending Cassazione review, and other narrow categories — timelines typically run two to four years through Italian civil court, with significant variation depending on the venue, the complexity of the constitutional or interpretive issue, and the docket of the specific tribunal.

Quiet Departure does not file Italian citizenship applications. The application work — consulate filings, judicial proceedings, document procurement and authentication, Italian municipality coordination — is performed by Italian-licensed counsel and qualified administrative service providers. The practice operates at the layer above that work, addressing the questions that determine whether the citizenship pathway makes sense for the specific client and how the citizenship project interacts with the broader jurisdictional position.

The Departure Briefing addresses, for clients considering Italian citizenship by descent, whether the lineage actually qualifies under Law 74/2025 (or under the grandfathered framework, if applicable); how the Italian citizenship project should be sequenced relative to Italian residency, US-side restructuring, and any contemplated tax-regime election; whether the structural objective is best served by the Italian pathway or by an alternative ancestry-citizenship route (the Irish Foreign Births Register, in particular, is increasingly relevant for clients whose Italian lineage no longer qualifies but who have other European ancestry); and the realistic timeline against which other planning work should be calibrated.

For clients whose situations exceed the scope of a Departure Briefing — substantial multi-jurisdictional wealth structures, complex trust architectures, family-office-level coordination across multiple citizenship pathways simultaneously — the practice refers to Borderless Concierge, the higher-tier engagement model in the same portfolio.

The first step is a Situation Review — a free thirty-minute call to determine whether Quiet Departure is the right firm for the situation. Most calls produce one of three outcomes: the client books a Departure Briefing, the client is referred to a different firm whose specialty fits better, or the client is told the situation is not yet ready for advisory engagement and given the analytical framework to revisit when it is.