An Italian great-grandparent used to be enough for citizenship. Not anymore.
For decades, Italian citizenship by descent worked like a genealogical loophole: prove an unbroken bloodline back to an Italian-born ancestor, and it didn’t matter if that ancestor left in 1890. An estimated 16.3 million Americans reported Italian ancestry in the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey, and a meaningful chunk of them assumed that lineage came with a standing invitation to an Italian passport. That invitation just got rescinded for most of them, and it happened faster than anyone was expecting.
The law that ended the “any generation” rule
On March 28, 2025, Italy’s government passed Decree-Law No. 36/2025, nicknamed the Tajani Decree. Parliament converted it into Law No. 74/2025 on May 23, 2025, permanently rewriting the citizenship statute. The new Article 3-bis replaced the old, unlimited generational chain with a proximity test — in plain terms, a cutoff.
Here’s what that cutoff actually means: recognition is now generally limited to people whose parent or grandparent was born in Italy. Great-grandparent or further back? You need to fit a specific statutory exception, not just a stack of birth certificates. (Yes, really — the great-grandparent route that fueled a decade of “I found my Italian passport” family research is functionally gone for new applicants.)
Who still gets in under the old rules
Italy didn’t yank the rug out from everyone mid-process. If you had already filed an application, or held a confirmed consular appointment before March 28, 2025, your case still gets assessed under the old, generation-agnostic rules. Save every confirmation email and screenshot — that’s your evidence if a consulate tries to apply the new test retroactively.
There’s also a narrow window for parents: if you have a pending claim and a minor child, you can file a declaration to preserve that child’s eligibility, but only through May 31, 2026. Miss it, and there’s no extension — the deadline is hard, not a suggestion.
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The courts already weighed in, and it didn’t go the way applicants hoped
Naturally, people sued. Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled on the case — Judgment No. 63/2026, decided between March and April 2026 — and upheld Parliament’s authority to set proximity limits, while affirming that the transitional protections for pre-deadline applicants should hold. Translation: the core reform is here to stay, not a temporary overreach waiting to get struck down.
Lower courts are still split on the finer details — mainly, whether just booking a consular appointment counts as “confirmed action,” or whether you needed to have actually filed documents. If your claim hinges on a technicality like that, expect a longer fight, possibly in front of a regional administrative court (TAR Lazio in Rome handles most consular disputes).
If you still think you qualify, here’s the actual bottleneck
The hardest part of any claim was never the paperwork you already have. It’s proving your Italian ancestor never naturalized somewhere else before the next link in your family chain was born. Americans can request that search through USCIS using Form G-1041A or a Freedom of Information Act request; Canadians go through IRCC; Australians go through the Department of Home Affairs. All three can take months, so this isn’t a step to start the week before a deadline.
You’ve also got two filing paths, and they’re not remotely equivalent. File through a consulate from the U.S. and you’re realistically looking at 12 to 36-plus months, depending on the backlog. Establish actual residency in Italy first and file at the local Comune instead, and it’s a comparatively fast 180 days — but getting a visa just to start that clock isn’t exactly a shortcut for most people, so pick your poison.
If your family’s whole citizenship plan is built on “well, my great-great-grandfather was born there,” it’s worth checking your line against the new proximity test before you spend a weekend buried in old ship manifests. So, where does your family actually land: inside the new cutoff, or in the grey zone everyone’s still fighting about?
