If You No Longer Qualify for Italian Citizenship by Descent: Residency, Visa, and Court Pathways After Law 74/2025
- dimartinolaw
- 0 Comments
- 8 views
- October 28, 2026
If You No Longer Qualify for Italian Citizenship by Descent: Residency, Visa, and Court Pathways After Law 74/2025
For more than a century, Italian citizenship by descent had no generational limit. A great-great-grandparent who left Calabria in 1890 could anchor a claim for a family in New Jersey today, and millions of Italian-Americans built plans around that rule: a second passport, a European base, a retirement in the town the family came from. That era ended on May 24, 2025, when Law 74/2025 came into force, and the question of whether it would survive was answered on March 12, 2026, when Italy’s Constitutional Court rejected the challenges against it. The two-generation limit stands.
For most families, the useful question is no longer whether the law changed. It is what to do now. The honest answer is that several routes remain open, some to citizenship and some to residency, and which one applies depends on facts specific to each family: when a claim was filed, which ancestor the line runs through, whether that ancestor ever held another citizenship, and what the family actually wants from Italy. This article walks through those routes in the order a careful advisor would check them, starting with the possibility that the claim was never lost at all.
Start here: three questions before anything else
The reform cut off a large group of applicants, but it did not cut off everyone who assumed it did. Before considering alternatives, three questions decide whether the original claim is still alive.
Was anything filed or booked before March 27, 2025? Applications formally submitted, consular appointments scheduled and confirmed by the authority, and court proceedings started by 11:59 PM Rome time on that date are assessed under the old rules, with no generational limit. Italy’s highest court has confirmed that the reform does not reach back to those cases. A family that booked a consular appointment in early 2025 and is still waiting for it may hold a fully protected claim without realizing it.
Does the line run through a parent or grandparent who held only Italian citizenship? The new rule treats a person born abroad with another citizenship as never having acquired Italian citizenship, unless an exception applies. The first exception is a parent or grandparent who holds, or held at death, exclusively Italian citizenship. The word that matters is exclusively. A grandfather who was born in Italy but became a U.S. citizen before he died does not satisfy it. A grandmother who lived her whole life as an Italian national and never naturalized elsewhere does, and her American-born grandchildren remain eligible to be recognized.
Did an Italian parent live in Italy for two years before the applicant’s birth? The second exception covers a parent, including an adoptive parent, who resided legally and continuously in Italy for at least two consecutive years after acquiring Italian citizenship and before the applicant was born or adopted. This exception matters most for families where the parent returned to Italy for a period, or was themselves recognized and then lived there, before the children arrived.
If any of the three answers is yes, the claim by descent may still succeed, and the right step is a consular or municipal application filed correctly under the new procedure, or the continuation of a protected case. If all three answers are no, the claim by descent is closed for that applicant, and the routes below are the ones that remain.
Pathway one: the 1948 maternal-line case, read correctly
Before January 1, 1948, Italian women could not transmit citizenship to their children. Claims running through a female ancestor whose child was born before that date have always required a court case in Italy rather than a consular application, and that route still exists. What has changed is how far it reaches. Cases started before March 27, 2025 continue under the old rules. Cases started after that date are, on the prevailing reading, subject to the same two-generation limit as every other new claim: the court can correct the historical discrimination against the maternal line, but it cannot restore a chain that the new Article 3-bis treats as never having existed.
The practical effect is that the 1948 route remains valuable for two groups: families whose case was already in court before the cutoff, and families whose maternal line runs through a parent or grandparent who meets one of the exceptions above. For a family whose only Italian ancestor is a great-grandmother who married an American in 1925, the court route does not reopen what the reform closed. That is a hard sentence to write, and we write it because the alternative is a family spending a year and a legal fee on a case that cannot succeed.
Pathway two: citizenship through two years of residence
The same reform that closed the generational chain opened a shorter door to citizenship through residence. Under Article 9 of the citizenship law as amended, a person whose parent or grandparent is or was an Italian citizen by birth can apply for naturalization after two consecutive years of legal residence in Italy, reduced from the previous three. For the Italian-American whose grandparent was born Italian but later naturalized in the United States, this is the route the reform left deliberately open: not recognition of something inherited, but a grant earned through actually living in the country.
Three features of this pathway deserve a clear statement. It is discretionary, a concession by the state rather than an automatic right, assessed on the applicant’s record and integration. It requires real relocation: legal entry on an appropriate visa, registration as a resident with the municipality, and two uninterrupted years. And it reaches only to the second degree. A great-grandchild of an Italian citizen does not qualify for the two-year period and falls under the general naturalization timelines, which for non-EU nationals remain substantially longer. For the family that qualifies, however, the sequence is coherent: a residency visa first, two years of Italian life, and an application for citizenship at the end of it.
Pathway three: entry for work as a descendant
The reform also included provisions intended to help people of Italian descent return, among them an entry route for employment for descendants of Italian citizens from countries of historic emigration, operating outside the annual immigration quotas that otherwise govern work permits. The implementing details and the practical uptake of this route are still developing, and anyone considering it should have the current position confirmed before planning around it. Where it applies, it offers something the other routes do not: a way for a working-age descendant to live and work in Italy lawfully, which in turn starts the residence clock described above.
Pathway four: residency without any citizenship claim
For many families, the citizenship plan was always a means to an end: time in Italy, a home there, freedom of movement in Europe. Those ends do not require citizenship, and two residency routes serve them directly, regardless of ancestry.
The Italy elective residence visa is built for people relocating to Italy on stable passive income, pensions, rental income, dividends, without working there. It is the natural route for the retiree who planned to spend the later years in Italy on an Italian passport and now needs another legal basis for the same life. Its requirements are specific and the consulates apply them strictly, which is why our step-by-step guide to the Elective Residence Visa and our article on what to do after a denial exist.
The Italian investor visa, often called the Golden Visa, serves the family that wants an Italian and EU residency base without relocating at all. A qualifying investment, from €250,000 in an innovative startup or €500,000 in an established Italian company, secures a renewable residence permit with no minimum stay requirement, and family members are included. For a family whose descent claim has closed but whose connection to Italy is real and whose means are substantial, this route frequently delivers the practical substance of what they wanted, and it does so on a timeline of months rather than years. The Italy Investor Visa overview sets out the routes, and our comparison of the Golden Visa and the Elective Residence Visa helps families decide between the two models.
Both residency routes also feed the residence clock. A family member who qualifies for two-year naturalization as the child or grandchild of an Italian citizen by birth, and who holds either visa, is accumulating the residence that leads to citizenship while living the life they planned.
One more window: minor children of recognized citizens
Families where a parent is already a recognized Italian citizen by birth should know about a separate provision. Children who were minors on May 24, 2025 can acquire citizenship through a declaration by their parents, and the deadline for that declaration, originally May 31, 2026, was extended by a law passed in February 2026 to May 31, 2029. Children born after May 24, 2025 have a three-year window from birth. For Italian-American parents who completed their own recognition years ago and assumed their children would simply inherit it, this declaration is now the mechanism, and it has a date attached.
How to choose among the pathways
The routes above are not alternatives to be weighed on preference. They are gates, and a family passes through the first one that is open to it. The sequence that follows from the law is this: confirm whether the descent claim survived, through a protected filing or an exception; if it did, pursue it, because recognition is the most complete outcome. If it did not, identify whether a parent or grandparent was Italian by birth, which opens the two-year residence route to citizenship. Then choose the residency visa that matches the family’s means and intended life, since that visa is both the legal basis for being in Italy and, where the two-year route applies, the start of the path to citizenship. The deciding facts are documentary: birth, marriage, and naturalization records on both sides of the Atlantic, assembled and read against the current rules.
The mistakes that cost families most
Two errors account for most of the damage we see in this area. The first is filing consular applications that cannot succeed under the new rules, usually on advice formed before 2025 or on the belief that a particular consulate still applies the old approach. Each refused application costs time, money, and a record. The second is the opposite: abandoning claims the law still protects, because the family read that citizenship by descent had ended and did not check whether their appointment date, their court filing, or their grandmother’s exclusively Italian nationality placed them inside an exception. A third error, less common but more expensive, is pursuing a 1948 court case filed after the cutoff on the assumption that the judicial route escapes the generational limit. In every case the remedy is the same: a document-based assessment of the family’s actual position before any filing is made.
Working with an Italian immigration attorney on both sides of the Atlantic
A family’s Italian citizenship position in 2026 is decided by Italian law applied to American records: U.S. naturalization files that establish when an ancestor acquired another citizenship, U.S. and Italian civil records that build the chain, and consular or court procedures in Italy that must be navigated from the United States. The analysis requires fluency in both systems and in both languages, and the stakes, a citizenship claim pursued or abandoned, justify getting it right once.
Di Martino Law Group advises Italian-American families on exactly this assessment: whether a claim by descent survives the reform, whether an exception or a protected filing applies, whether the two-year residence route is available, and which residency visa fits the family that decides to relocate or to establish a base in Italy. As an Italian immigration attorney practice working in English and Italian from Los Angeles, the firm handles the document work on the American side and the filings on the Italian side within a single engagement. For families whose plans were built on a rule that no longer exists, that is the conversation that replaces the plan with a route, and an Italian immigration lawyer who handles every pathway can recommend the one that actually fits rather than the only one they process.
If your family’s Italian citizenship claim has been affected by the 2025 reform, the right time to assess your position is before any application is filed. Our earlier article on the 2026 changes to Italian citizenship explains the reform itself; this one is about what comes next. Contact Di Martino Law Group for an Italian citizenship and residency pathway consultation.
