American naturalizations in Italy reached 824 in 2024, up from 280 in 2014, according to Eurostat’s citizenship acquisitions dataset. The trajectory is the steepest on record for Italian citizenship by descent for Americans, a five-year compound annual growth rate of about 15.6%. Then, in March 2025, Italy slammed the door on the route that produced most of those numbers.
The pre-reform peak matters because the law that took effect May 24, 2025 doesn’t apply retroactively to applications filed or appointments booked before March 27, 2025. The 2024 cohort got in under the old rules. The next cohort won’t.
What changed in March
Italian citizenship by descent, known as jure sanguinis or jus sanguinis, the right of blood, had no generational limit for more than a century. An American who could document an unbroken citizenship line back to an Italian-born ancestor alive on or after Italy’s 1861 unification was, in the eyes of Italian law, already Italian. They didn’t acquire citizenship through the consulate. They proved it.
Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani issued Decree-Law 36/2025 on March 28, 2025, citing “extraordinary necessity and urgency” to impose limits. Parliament converted the decree into Law 74/2025, which took effect May 24. Recognition by descent now reaches only as far back as a parent or grandparent born in Italy. Great-grandparents and earlier ancestors no longer transmit citizenship automatically.
The 2024 surge in Italian citizenship by descent for Americans
Italy’s naturalization counts for former US citizens climbed steadily through the 2010s, then jumped after 2020: 187 in pandemic-disrupted 2020, 400 in 2021, 662 in 2022, 819 in 2023, 824 in 2024. The 11-year total reached 4,798.
Those numbers count completed acquisitions, not applications filed. Consular processing for descent cases routinely ran 24 to 36 months before the reform. The lag cuts both ways. The 824 figure understates the demand that built before the reform. It will also overstate the trend for at least one more reporting cycle, as pre-March 2025 cases continue to clear.
A separate vote, a separate signal
A June 2025 referendum proposed cutting the naturalization residency requirement for foreign residents from 10 years to five. It failed to reach the 50% turnout threshold needed to be binding, so the 10-year rule held. Italy tightened the route built around ancestry and rejected the proposal that would have widened the route built around residence. For Americans pursuing Italian citizenship through Italian ancestry, the descent path is narrower and the residence path is no shorter.
What the courts have done so far
On March 11, 2026, Italy’s Constitutional Court heard the Tribunal of Turin’s challenge to Law 74/2025. The next day it rejected the case, declaring the constitutional questions partly unfounded and partly inadmissible. The Court substantively rejected the argument that the law violates EU citizenship provisions under Articles 9 of the Treaty on European Union and 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU. It set the human-rights claim aside on procedural grounds.
Two more proceedings are still in motion. On April 14, 2026, the Court of Cassation’s Sezioni Unite heard the “minor issue,” whether an Italian ancestor’s foreign naturalization while a child was still a minor severed the bloodline for later generations. The written ruling is expected between mid-May and mid-June. A separate constitutional challenge from the Tribunal of Mantova, filed on different grounds from the Turin case, is scheduled for June 9, 2026.
What this tells us about Americans in Italy
The descent pipeline did most of the work in the 2024 numbers. Italy’s resident American population grew more slowly. ISTAT recorded 17,650 US citizens resident in Italy in 2025, up from 13,528 in 2016. The US-born population reached 55,658, reflecting decades of naturalizations and dual nationality.
Italy’s American story isn’t a relocation surge. It’s a citizenship surge built on ancestry, and that’s what Law 74/2025 broke. The 824 figure for 2024 is, for now, both a peak and a baseline. What the 2025 number shows when Eurostat publishes it next September will reveal how quickly the pre-reform pipeline drains. The Cassation ruling expected by mid-June and the June 9 Mantova hearing will reveal whether the courts narrow the law’s reach from the edges.
