For over a century and a half Italian citizenship has been based on the principle of ius sanguinis: it is a citizen who is born from an Italian citizen. The ius sanguinis was one of the legal pillars of the State since the birth of united Italy and linked the country to its diaspora. This system could now change significantly after the intervention of the Italian Constitutional Court, which rejected most of the disputes against the law introduced in 2025 by the government led by Giorgia Meloni.
The rule, approved by decree in March 2025, substantially restricts the right to citizenship for those born abroad. According to the new discipline, only descendants with at least one parent or grandfather born in Italy can be recognized. A further requirement is introduced: that ancestor must have kept Italian citizenship exclusively at the time of the birth of the descendant, or at the time of his death if it occurred before.
The appeal examined by the Court had been filed by some judges of the Court of Turin, who had raised doubts about the constitutional legitimacy of the reform. After the first hearing, however, the Court stated the questions “partly unfounded and partly inadmissible”, in fact anticipating support for the government’s position. The full reason for the judgment should be published in the coming weeks, but the indication arrived from the Court has already drastically reduced the expectations of those who hoped for an annulment of the rule.
The system of ius sanguinis has accompanied the history of Italian emigration. Between 1861 and 1918 about 16 million Italians left the country to look for work and opportunities elsewhere, especially in the Americas. Many of them retained Italian citizenship even after obtaining another nationality, transmitting it to their children and grandchildren. The principle was formalized in the civil code of 1865, then confirmed by the law on citizenship of 1912 and the 1992 reform.
In recent years, however, the system has often been put under pressure: requests for recognition of citizenship by descendants abroad have increased rapidly, especially in countries with strong presence of Italian origin such as Argentina, Brazil and the United States. According to data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, between 2014 and 2024 the number of Italian citizens resident abroad has passed from 4.6 to 6.4 million. Only in 2024 the Italian consulates in Argentina managed about 30 thousand questions of citizenship, ten thousand more than the previous year.
The process of recognition was already complex before the reform: the applicants had to reconstruct the entire genealogical line, recover certificates of birth, marriage and death from the Italian archives – often with costs that reach approximately 300 euros per document – and demonstrate that no ancestor had lost citizenship. To this were added lists of consular waiting that in some places exceeded the ten years. In order to speed up the procedure many families addressed the Italian courts, however, helping to further congest the judicial system.
Some jurists, such as Marco Mellone, argue that the game is not definitively closed and that new appeals may reach the Court of Cassation or the European institutions.
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