ROME — Two American families brought their fight for Italian citizenship to Italy’s supreme court on Tuesday, challenging new restrictions enacted by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration that limit heritage-based citizenship claims.
The families’ attorney, Marco Mellone, presented arguments to the Cassation Court contesting a year-old statute that blocks citizenship applications from Italian descendants beyond two generations. Mellone maintains the restrictions should only affect individuals born after the legislation became active, which could open citizenship doors for millions of Americans and Latin Americans with Italian roots.
An expanded judicial panel is expected to issue a binding decision within weeks that will guide future lower court rulings.
The far-right government implemented the decree in March 2025, halting previous policies that permitted anyone proving Italian lineage dating to the country’s 1861 unification to pursue citizenship. While Italy’s constitutional court upheld the new statute last month, Mellone believes the supreme court can determine the law’s exact application.
“The families involved in this case are simply descendants … from an Italian ancestor who emigrated in the late 19th century to the United States, like millions of other people, of other Italians,” Mellone stated before the proceedings. “Today they are invoking their right to Italian citizenship.”
The attorney’s legal challenge could determine citizenship eligibility for descendants of approximately 14 million Italians who left their homeland between 1877 and 1914, based on Foreign Ministry data, along with later emigrants.
Though Mellone represents two families specifically, an additional dozen individuals whose citizenship applications were halted by the new law gathered outside the courthouse in support.
Karen Bonadio expressed hopes of eventually relocating to Italy based on her heritage. She displayed childhood photographs of herself with her Italian-born great-grandparents who moved from Basilicata in southern Italy to upstate New York, accompanied by their official birth documents.
“The new law says, ‘all these great-grandchildren didn’t know their great-grandparents.’ This is from 1963, I think I was 3 ½,” she explained while showing the photograph.
At least one case Mellone is handling had been denied in lower courts prior to the new legislation, partly due to decisions stating that Italian emigrants who acquired foreign citizenship before having children cannot transfer Italian nationality.
Jennifer Daly’s application has navigated Italian administrative processes for almost ten years. Her grandfather, Giuseppe Dallfollo, moved to America in 1912 from the northern Trento province when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He subsequently married an Italian woman, brought her to the United States, and eventually obtained American citizenship.
Daly explained she maintained a strong Italian cultural identity despite her surname being anglicized by American immigration authorities. She pursued citizenship because “it is truly a recognition of who I am, where I am from. It’s so much more than citizenship. It’s everything,” the retired history professor said during a phone interview from Salina, Kansas.
At the courthouse, Alexis Traino shared that great-grandparents from both her mother’s and father’s families originated from Italy, where she currently resides, primarily in Florence.
“My entire life, I grew up knowing — and my parents always emphasized — that I was Italian. I had a very, very strong connection with Italy,” said the 34-year-old Traino, who was awaiting documentation from both Italy and the United States when the new law passed, halting her application.
“I want to be Italian. I want to contribute to Italy and be a citizen,” she declared.
