Italian Citizenship Legal Updates

The first question before the Sezioni Unite concerns a 1912 Italian citizenship law. Law 555/1912 was Italy's first unified citizenship statute, and Article 12 paragraph 2 dealt with what happened to the citizenship of a minor (non-emancipated) child when the child's parent lost Italian citizenship by naturalizing in another country.

The strict historical reading of that article — applied by Italian consulates and courts for decades — says the minor child also automatically lost Italian citizenship in that moment, with no choice in the matter. Because citizenship cannot be passed down a bloodline that has been broken, every descendant after that minor child would also be considered non-Italian at birth.

This is known in the citizenship-by-descent community as the “minor rule” or “minor issue,” and it is one of the most common reasons an otherwise eligible descendant's application is rejected.

In Cassazione Order 17161/2023 and Sentence 454/2024, the Corte di Cassazione's First Civil Section applied this strict reading. According to news coverage, the Italian Ministry of the Interior issued a circular dated October 3, 2024 instructing Italian consulates and municipal civil registry offices to follow those rulings.

The cases before the Sezioni Unite challenge that interpretation. According to Servizi Demografici and ItalyGet, the First Civil Section itself referred the question to the Sezioni Unite in two interlocutory orders (20122/2025 and 20129/2025, both dated July 18, 2025), observing that lower courts were issuing conflicting rulings and that the question needed to be resolved at the highest level.

In an interview with ItalyGet on February 12, 2026, attorney Marco Mellone framed the stakes this way:

“Italians emigrated and naturalized late, at 30, 35, or 40 years old. At the time, the age of majority was reached at 21. It is clear that they had minor children.”

In other words: the strict reading of Article 12(2) would disqualify the majority of descendants of Italians who emigrated between roughly 1880 and 1920 — precisely the wave that produced most modern Italian-American and Italian-Brazilian descent claims.

The second question before the Sezioni Unite concerns timing: whether Italy's 2025 citizenship reform applies retroactively to people who were already Italian at birth under the old rules.

The reform in question is Decree-Law 36 of March 28, 2025, widely known as the “Decreto Tajani” after Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani. It was converted into Law 74 of May 23, 2025, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale (Serie Generale n. 118). According to ItalyGet's explainer, the law restricted automatic citizenship-by-descent recognition to applicants whose parent or grandparent was born in Italy — a sharp two-generation cap compared to the previous system, which had no generational limit.

Law 74/2025 preserved eligibility under the old rules for applications filed before March 28, 2025. This “grandfathering” protection covers tens of thousands of applications — filed with consulates, Italian municipalities, or courts — that are still pending.

What the Sezioni Unite is being asked: whether Law 74/2025 reaches those grandfathered applications through a doctrine called ius superveniens (new law applied to pending proceedings), or whether they continue to be governed by the pre-2025 framework.

Two separate Constitutional Court rulings

Two Italian Constitutional Court decisions have already addressed related questions. They are often conflated in public coverage, but they are different rulings on different issues. Understanding the distinction matters.

Sentenza 142/2025 was decided on June 24, 2025 and deposited on July 31, 2025. According to the Corte Costituzionale's own case summary and Boccadutri's explainer, this ruling addressed a challenge filed before the Tajani Decree was issued, contesting the broader pre-2025 framework itself. The Constitutional Court declined to restrict citizenship by descent through its own ruling and clarified that the new 2025 rules do not apply to cases pending before March 28, 2025.

The Constitutional Court's March 12, 2026 ruling addressed a different challenge — this one filed by the Turin Tribunal on behalf of eight Venezuelan claimants, directly targeting the Tajani Decree and Law 74/2025. According to Open Online and Boccadutri, the Court rejected those challenges “in parte non fondate e in parte inammissibili” (“partly unfounded and partly inadmissible”), upholding the core of Law 74/2025, including the March 27, 2025 application deadline and Article 3-bis. This is the ruling the Associated Press referenced when it wrote, “Italy's constitutional court ruled the new law valid last month.”

Neither Constitutional Court ruling resolved the specific ius superveniens question — whether the new law reaches already-pending applications. That is the question now before the Sezioni Unite.