When we talk about Italian citizenship and international mobility, many immediately think of the bureaucratic implications, leaving the deep interweaving of history, identity and fundamental rights that characterizes them. Among recent regulatory developments, referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union and the impact of new technologies in forensic practice, the path to recognition of rights today requires a vision that is both strategic, flexible and rigorous.
In this interview, Attorney Salvatore Aprigliano, founder of Aprigliano International Law Firm, analyzes the transformations of the sector, from the irreplaceable value of human argument regarding Artificial Intelligence to the concrete gap between the times of justice and the real needs of those who choose to invest or live in Italy.
Counselor Aprigliano, we start from the beginning. Why did you decide to undertake this profession, is that what you dreamed of doing as a child?
I think I decided to become a lawyer during a philosophy class in high school.
My teacher explained a simple but powerful idea: living together requires rules. We renounce to a certain degree of absolute freedom because the rules make possible an organized and safer society.
That idea remained in me. I remember thinking that if most of our lives are shaped by rules and principles, one of the most interesting things I could do was learn how they work and understand the reasoning behind them.
Since then I have never seen the right as a set of rules to be stored, but as a system with its own logic. What fascinated me then, and which still fascinates me today, is to understand why a norm exists and what principle sustains it.
Why did you choose to dedicate your career to the right of immigration and citizenship, an area so full of implications, both human and legal?
I was attracted by immigration and citizenship because they are areas where the law can change the course of a person’s life. I feel this responsibility very strongly, and this makes the job much more personal to me. There is also a family reason.
My father left from South Italy in the early 1960s and moved to the North. I was born and raised in Northern Italy and never lived in the South, yet part of my identity comes from there. It came through my father and my grandparents: their values, their stories, their culture, even the way we lived as a family.
It is difficult to explain, but it is very real. You can belong completely to the place where you were born and raised and still feel that another place is part of who you are, even if you have never lived there.
I think this helps me understand the Italian diaspora. The roots can be geographically distant, or trace back to more generations ago, and still remain part of your identity. When I talk to an Italian descendant, I often see this: someone who seeks the legal recognition of a part of their history that has long led with him.
The studio Aprigliano is called an innovative legal boutique. How can you merge these two opposites to offer a service that is, at the same time, technological and “sartorial”?
I don’t really see technology and sartorial service as opposed.
A tailor can use a sewing machine instead of sewing each piece by hand. The dress remains sartorial if it was designed, cut and made for that specific person. I think about the legal services more or less the same.
In an international law firm there are many organizational, documentary and repetitive activities that technology can make faster and more reliable. Every minute we save there is time we can devote to what should never be standardized: understanding the case, talking to the customer, identifying the real problem and developing the right strategy.
Our philosophy is simple: standardizing the process, not the customer. Technology has to make work more efficient. The legal strategy must remain personal.
Technology for you is a pillar of efficiency. What was the most complex technological challenge or the most daring digital investment it wanted to implement in the study, and what impact did it have on your international customers?
The biggest challenge has never been to choose a software. It was made sure that a client’s case didn’t depend on which lawyer he was opening the file that morning. So we built a system to organize each stage of work in a disciplined manner, maintaining the same level of individual attention, as the study grew.
In my opinion, knowledge should never remain in the hands of one lawyer. If a team member discovers a better subject, it solves a new problem or identifies a risk we have not seen yet, that knowledge must become a patrimony of the study. This is where technology has become more precious to us. We use it to transform individual knowledge into shared knowledge, through internal guidelines, controls, analysis tools, review procedures and continuous updates.
For me, this was one of the most important investments we made growing as a study: to ensure that a larger team generated more collective knowledge, and not just more separate professionals. For our customers, the result should be consistency. The quality of their case should not depend on which individual lawyer deals with a particular passage.
We talk a lot about Artificial Intelligence applied to law. There are those who fear that algorithms will replace lawyers. From its privileged observatory, what is that “human spark” and the added value that no technology can ever remove from the advice made in person?
I don’t think AI can replace the lawyer, especially when the task is not simply applying an existing law, but building a new legal argument. If a legal argument is really new, you cannot expect to recover it simply as already established knowledge.
AI can help me find rules, judgments, backgrounds and information much faster. This is extremely useful. But it cannot decide which elements really matter to me, how they are connected, or what legal strategy should be built from them. This remains the task of the lawyer. AI gives us access to more information, faster. The lawyer must however select them, test them, interpret them and decide how to use them.
If your goal is simply to follow an established law, technology can be an extraordinary accelerator. But if you are trying to build a new legal path, you still have to do what lawyers have always done: study, connect things that others may not have connected yet, and assume responsibility for the argument you are supporting.
Citizenship iure sanguinis is a constitutionally guaranteed right, yet the descendants of the Italian emigrants collide with huge bureaucratic barriers. What is today the most complex “battle” that is facing on this front?
I would like to begin with a clarification, because it counts. Italian citizenship is a status protected by the Constitution. But the specific rules on how citizenship is transmitted from parent to child are written by Parliament within certain limits. Where exactly those limits are placed is the object of the current battle.
The most difficult issue today arises from the reform of citizenship of 2025. He has drastically changed the rules on citizenship by descent, applying these new restrictions also to people already born at the time of entry into force.
That retroactive effect is at the heart of the legal debate. And this brings me back to what first attracted me to the law in high school: a norm never exists isolated.
If being lawyers simply meant reading a law and applying it to the letter, lawyers would probably be much less necessary. Today you could ask for an IA system: “I am a descendant of the fourth generation. What does the new law say?”, and this could respond immediately: “The rule excludes you. ”
But that’s not where legal analysis ends. That’s where it starts. You must then ask whether that rule is consistent with the rest of the legal system — with the Italian Constitution, with the law of the European Union and with the legal principles of higher rank. A law can be fully in force and still meet limits due to over-order rules. That is exactly what happened with the reform of 2025.
In April 2026 the Constitutional Court issued judgment No 63. Many have read it as the end of the story. In that same decision, the Court also chose not to put the European question back to the Court of Justice, considering the answer already sufficiently clear.
We have read it differently, and we have kept the subject of European Union law at the center of our acts.
A few months later, by order n. 147 of 2026, in a procedure in which our study was not involved, the Court itself followed a different procedural path. He suspended the judgment and remitted a question to the Court of Justice of the European Union: if Articles 9 TEU and 20 TFEU preclude the purchase of Italian citizenship from persons born abroad before that rule existed, if they already have another citizenship.
On the European level, this is a significant change within a few months. I want to be precise about what this is, and what it’s not. It is not a pronunciation that declares the reform invalid. It is not a decision of the Court of Justice, which has not yet been expressed. Do not automatically reopen the cases already decided.
What it means is that the question is now before the court that has the last word on Union law and no one can say today how that court will respond. For me, this is a very concrete example of what makes this profession fascinating: not to stop at the single norm, but to understand the legal system in which that standard must operate.
In addition to descent, the world of global mobility has changed. Today we talk a lot of visas for investors (Investor Visa), digital nomads and visas for elective residence. Who is the “new migrant” that addresses Studio Aprigliano and what are the Italian bureaucratic pitfalls that risk running away the great capitals or foreign talents?
In a globalized world, there is no single stereotype of the “new migrant”. People move for work, investment, retirement, or simply because technology allows them to spend part of their lives elsewhere.
In Italy, the biggest challenge is bureaucracy. Times are not always predictable, even when the law provides deadlines, and different offices do not always operate exactly the same. So knowing the norm is not always enough. It is also necessary to know how a certain office interprets it and how that procedure works in practice.
This practical knowledge can make a significant difference in completing a case efficiently and avoid unnecessary delays.
The entrepreneur or multinational who decides to invest and operate in Italy often meets with a labyrinth regulatory system. What is the greatest fear of those who turn to you and how your assistance manages to disconnect it?
For companies, the biggest concern is often uncertainty over time. Businesses plan investments, assumptions, transfers and market entry on the basis of deadlines. A few months delay can have a real impact on a project.
This is where constant experience counts with these procedures. Because we work with these offices every day, we also follow changes in their practices and procedures. Presenting a complete practice from the beginning, based not only on the law but also on what the specific office requires in concrete, can prevent additional documentation requests and avoid significant delays.
More generally, assisting an international customer requires more than just knowledge of the norm. You have to understand how that standard works in the real world and what the customer is actually trying to get. Our goal is to make this path as predictable as possible.
As for the continuous update, much comes from the work itself. We compare each day with these offices and listen to customers explain why a certain delay is important for their business. This says more than any source about how things are actually moving.
Behind every hawk and every resort there are stories of life, dreams of return to the origins. Is there a case, among the many treaties, that remained particularly in her heart? What did you hear she wasn’t just winning a lawsuit, but returning an identity?
There is a case I remember very clearly, that of an retired American couple who had decided to spend the next chapter of his life in Italy. Their case of citizenship was relatively simple. They had tried for a couple of years to get a consular appointment without success, so they eventually turned to us and we filed an appeal in Italy.
The hearing was set just before Christmas. In a case like theirs, we reasonably expected the court to start a decision shortly after. Then, only a few days before the hearing, we were informed that it had been postponed three months for internal organizational needs of the court.
I still remember the video call with the client. He greeted me in an Italian wonderfully ancient, probably learned from his grandfather and, laughing, said something like: “From today we are Pakistani. ” It was at that time that he told me that he and his wife had already moved to Italy.
I was upset because it wasn’t the original plan. He always told me that they would move after the conclusion of the case of citizenship and after getting the Italian passports. But during the summer they had spent time in Italy visiting relatives, and at some point they simply decided not to wait any longer. At Christmas they had already bought home, shipped furniture and transferred their lives.
He laughed. I was paralyzed. Not because I thought their case was weak. In fact, the opposite. But I knew something he was not thinking about at that time: even in a simple case, the courts can postpone hearings, judges can change, and times can slip.
While he was celebrating the transfer, I was already calculating how much time they could legally stay in Italy and what we should have done if the sentence had not arrived in time. And that’s exactly what happened.
As American citizens, they could not simply remain in Italy indefinitely waiting for the citizenship sentence. Once the short stay period allowed expired, they needed a valid stay status to stay in the country. Otherwise they risked being in an irregular stay, with potentially serious consequences on the immigration level.
So we suddenly managed two practices at the same time: the case of citizenship and a living solution that allowed them to remain legally in Italy while the judicial process continued. We had to organize everything very quickly, along with residence issues and other administrative aspects related to their status.
The case was postponed again. What initially seemed like a three-month delay became at the end of about six months, with further uncertainty due to other referrals and changes of the judge assigned to the case.
In the end we have obtained the recognition of their Italian citizenship, and today live in Italy as Italian citizens.
That case was imprinted because it showed me, in a very concrete way, the difference between the time of law and the time of real life. A three-month referral may seem a procedural detail on a judicial calendar. But for the people involved can affect where they can live, if they can establish the residence, and if the life they had already begun to build can continue as expected.
He also confirmed something that I always tell customers: even when a case looks solid, you always have to think about the practical consequences if times change. Behind each file there are people who make real decisions about their lives. Our task is not only to argue the right, but to understand what happens to them while the law does its course.
Looking back to the early years of career, and then to the Milanese study of today, what is the most valuable advice you would give and what do you think was your greatest insight?
I would say to myself younger: never fall in love with your subject. Strong convictions are important in law. But it is equally important to put them to the test, to look for the contrary arguments and to wonder if there is a better interpretation.
Over the years I have developed a habit. When I build a new legal argument, I ask the other lawyers of the firm to try to demolish it.
Criticism forces you to see the question from angles you may have neglected. It exposes weaknesses. And sometimes it tells you if your subject is really solid, or if you just got attached to it.
As for my greatest intuition, I think it has been understood that a law firm can really grow only if individual knowledge becomes collective knowledge. Hire more lawyers is not enough. It takes a system where what a person learns becomes available to everyone.
In many ways, this reflects my approach to the law itself: to continue studying, to share what you learn, to test your own certainties and never to treat a solution as definitive only because it worked yesterday.
To conclude, Counselor: if it were to sum up in one word, or in a motto, the philosophy that guides you and your team every day when you open the doors of the Milan studio, what would it be?
Keep learning. Look beyond the obvious. Understand the person before deciding.
I think these three things go together. Keep studying. Look at the problems from angles that others may not consider, without fear of leaving the usual pattern. But at the same time, understand the person you are facing. Customers are not files or numbers. They’re people. Each has a different history and different needs. Very often, the difference lies in the details.
You can know a rule perfectly, but if you don’t understand what a decision really means for that person’s life, it’s hard to give a really good advice. And that’s the opposite. Understanding the customer is not enough if you stop studying the law, testing your certainties and looking for better solutions. This, in the end, is what I want our study to do every day.
L’articolo Italian citizenship, speaks lawyer Salvatore Aprigliano: «Standardize the process, never the customer» comes from IlNewyorkese.
