Italy's Interior Ministry told its consulates and town halls in a circular dated Aug. 10 that they had been reading a 1912 law wrong. People rejected under what Italian officials call the "minor issue" can now ask the same office that turned them down to look at the file again.
The dispute is about what happened when an Italian emigrant became an American. Under Italy's 1912 nationality law, a parent's naturalization abroad could also strip Italian citizenship from that parent's children while they were still minors. If it did, the family line broke there.
Descendants born decades later had nothing to inherit, which is the whole basis of citizenship by descent, known in Italian law as jure sanguinis.
Why children born in the Americas were different
The 1912 law took citizenship from a child only when three things lined up: the parent in charge lost Italian citizenship, the child lived with that parent, and the child then acquired the parent's new nationality.
A child born in the United States never acquired anything. The United States grants citizenship to anyone born on its soil, so those children were American and Italian from their first day. Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela work the same way.
A separate provision of the same law, Article 7, protected precisely that situation, and said such a child keeps Italian citizenship unless renouncing it as an adult.
Italy's highest civil court agreed. The Corte di Cassazione's combined chambers, which exist to settle arguments over how a law should be read, decided judgment 24045/2026 on July 26 and published it the next day. Citizenship held from birth is a fixed status, the court said. A parent's later choice can't reach back and take it away.
What the ministry told its offices to do
Circular Prot. 0065050 replaces Circular 43347 of Oct. 3, 2024, the instruction that generated the denials in the first place. It directs prefects, mayors and registry officers to follow the July judgment.
Rejected applicants don't have to start over. The circular calls for "a mere re-examination" of paperwork already on file, and the office that issued the denial keeps the case even if the applicant has since moved to another city or country, The Local Italy reported Aug. 18. The circular says nothing about fees.
It reaches naturalizations that happened between July 1, 1912 and Aug. 15, 1992, the years the old law was in force.
Does the 2025 law still block them?
For many people, yes. Winning the minor issue argument doesn't undo what Italy did last year. Law 74/2025 ended automatic recognition for people born abroad who already hold another nationality, and only two narrow exceptions survived into the final text.
One requires an ancestor no further back than a grandparent who held Italian citizenship and nothing else, either now or at death. The other requires a parent who lived in Italy for two straight years after becoming a citizen and before the child was born.
Applications submitted, or consular appointments confirmed by the relevant office, by 11:59 p.m. Rome time on March 27, 2025 are exempt from all of it. Everyone else now faces one obstacle instead of two. The minor issue is gone. The 2025 law isn't.
That law is under review in Luxembourg. Italy's Constitutional Court paused a group of cases in June and asked the Court of Justice of the European Union whether EU law lets a country bar citizenship this way for people born before the restriction existed, an order it published July 23.
What's still unknown
The Interior Ministry hasn't said how many people the 2024 policy rejected. No count by consulate, no count by year. It set no deadline for requesting a review either.
Two practical questions have no answer yet. The circular doesn't say how long a re-examination should take, and it says nothing about the people who answered a 2024 denial by suing, whose cases are sitting in Italian courts now.
