Jure sanguinis, explained

The legal foundation

Italy first codified jure sanguinis transmission in Law 555 of 13 June 1912. That law restricted transmission to the paternal line only (Art. 1). Women could not pass citizenship to their children except in narrow cases, unknown father, stateless father, or children born out of wedlock.

Law 91/1992 replaced Law 555 and introduced full gender equality: citizenship passes through “father or mother” without distinction. It also allowed dual citizenship for the first time. Before 1992, naturalising in another country meant automatic loss of Italian citizenship.

Who qualifies

You may qualify if you have an unbroken chain of Italian citizenship from an Italian-born ancestor down to you. The chain breaks if any person in the line naturalised as a citizen of another country before the birth of the next person. The timing is everything.

That is the half of the rule nobody disputes. A naturalisation that happened after the next birth, while that child was still a minor living in the same household, is the half that is currently before the courts, and it is the shape most UK families turn out to have.

Since 24 May 2025, Law 74/2025 restricts new applications to two generations (see below). But for applications filed before 28 March 2025, the old rules apply, no generational limit.

The 1948 rule

The Italian Constitution entered force on 1 January 1948, establishing gender equality under Art. 3. The Constitutional Court later struck down the male-only transmission rule in Sentenza 30/1983, but only from 1 January 1948 forward. For births before that date where citizenship passed through a woman, the consular route is unavailable.

These cases must go through the Italian courts. The Court of Cassation (Sezioni Unite, 4466/2009) confirmed that the equality principle applies retroactively to pre-1948 births, but only a court, not a consulate or comune, can make the recognition. An Italian attorney registered with the bar (iscritto all'albo) must file the petition, typically at the Tribunale Civile di Roma or the tribunal with jurisdiction over the ancestor's comune. Since June 2022, cases can be filed at local tribunals rather than exclusively in Rome.

Court cases take 12 to 24 months on average. The court filing fee (contributo unificato) is paid per petitioner; attorney fees vary by case complexity and chosen practice.

Law 74/2025, the generation limit

Decree-Law 36 of 28 March 2025, converted into Law 74/2025 on 23 May 2025 (the “Decreto Tajani”), introduced Art. 3-bis to Law 91/1992.

The “exclusively Italian” requirement in condition (c) is strict. If an Italian parent also held British citizenship, the condition is not met. The Ministry of Interior's Circolare 26185 (28 May 2025) specifies that self-declarations are insufficient, official certificates of non-naturalisation are required as evidence.

The Constitutional Court has ruled on art. 3-bis once, and the ruling is narrower than it is usually reported. Sentenza 63/2026 was decided on 11 March 2026 and deposited on 30 April 2026. The referral that reached the Court came from the Tribunale di Torino and was expressly limited to the words “anche prima della data di entrata in vigore del presente articolo” and to conditions (a), (a-bis) and (b).

Condition (c), the generational condition, was not before the Court. Two of the questions referred were held inadmissible and two unfounded. So the Court declined to strike down the retroactive reach of the article and the grandfathering limbs. It did not rule that the generational condition is constitutionally legitimate, and anyone telling you that question is settled is describing a judgment that was never asked.

Three routes to recognition

The shape of the process

The recognition process moves through ancestor identification (with the relevant Italian comune holding the original civil records), collection of vital records across every life event in the chain, evidence of non-naturalisation for any UK-resident ancestor, foreign-document legalisation in two stages (original then translation, both apostilled), and submission to the consulate that holds jurisdiction. Each stage carries its own administrative weight and its own failure modes; the work is sequential rather than parallel, and partial submissions are not accepted.

Pending legal questions

Two unresolved issues could affect applications filed in 2026. The Sezioni Unite hearing on 14 April 2026 will decide whether minor children automatically lost Italian citizenship when their father naturalised abroad (Art. 12 vs Art. 7 of Law 555/1912). Recent rulings (Cassazione 17161/2023 and 454/2024) reversed decades of practice on this point.

Separately, whether Law 74/2025's generation limit applies to 1948 court cases remains untested. These cases rest on constitutional equality rights (Art. 3 of the Constitution), and some lawyers argue that an ordinary law cannot retroactively limit a constitutional right. No court has ruled on this interaction post-reform.