{"id":6848,"date":"2026-04-14T14:30:22","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T14:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/6848\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T14:30:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T14:30:22","slug":"us-families-contest-italian-law-restricting-citizenship-by-descent-in-highest-court-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/6848\/","title":{"rendered":"US families contest Italian law restricting citizenship by descent in highest court"},"content":{"rendered":"

ROME — Two U.S. families went to Italy’s<\/a> highest court Tuesday to challenge the scope of a year-old law passed by Giorgia Meloni’s government limiting citizenship claims to Italian descendants removed by more than two generations. <\/p>\n

Their lawyer, Marco Mellone, argued before the Cassation Court that the law should apply only to people born after it took effect, potentially opening a pathway to citizenship for millions of people living in the United States and parts of Latin America.<\/p>\n

A decision by an expanded panel, which makes the ruling binding in lower courts, is expected in the coming weeks. <\/p>\n

A decree by the far-right-led government in March 2025 put the brakes on previous rules allowing anyone who could prove ancestry after Italy\u2019s formation in 1861 to seek citizenship. Italy\u2019s constitutional court last month ruled the new law is valid, but Mellone said the supreme court has the power to clarify the scope of the law.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u2019\u2019 Mellone said before the hearing. “Today they are invoking their right to Italian citizenship.”<\/p>\n

Mellone\u2019s case would clarify the citizenship rights of the descendants of some 14 million Italians who emigrated between 1877 and 1914, according to Foreign Ministry statistics, and beyond.<\/p>\n

While Mellone\u2019s case involves two families, another dozen people whose citizenship claims were stopped by the law were present outside the courthouse in solidarity. <\/p>\n

Karen Bonadio said she hopes one day to move to Italy on the strength of her ancestry. She brought photos of her as a young girl alongside her Italian-born great-grandparents, who emigrated from Basilicata in southern Italy to upstate New York, along with their birth certificates.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe new law says, \u2018all these great-grandchildren didn\u2019t know their great-grandparents.’ This is from 1963, I think I was 3 \u00bd,\u2019\u2019 she said, showing the photograph. <\/p>\n

At least one of Mellone\u2019s cases had been rejected in lower courts before the new law, hinging partially on rulings that Italian emigrants who took on another citizenship before having children cannot pass on Italian citizenship. <\/p>\n

Jennifer Daly\u2019s case has been working its way through the Italian bureaucracy for nearly a decade. Her grandfather, Giuseppe Dallfollo, immigrated to the U.S. in 1912 from the northern province of Trento when it was under Austro-Hungarian control. He later married an Italian woman and brought her over, and at some point became a naturalized U.S. citizen. <\/p>\n

Daly said she always had a strong Italian identity that transcended her last name anglicized by U.S. immigration officials. She petitioned for citizenship because \u201cit is truly a recognition of who I am, where I am from. It\u2019s so much more than citizenship. It\u2019s everything,” Daly, a retired history professor, said by phone from Salina, Kansas. <\/p>\n

Outside the courthouse, Alexis Traino said great-grandparents on both her maternal and paternal sides had come from Italy, where she now lives, mainly in Florence. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy entire life, I grew up knowing \u2014 and my parents always emphasized \u2014 that I was Italian. I had a very, very strong connection with Italy,” said Traino, 34, who was waiting for documents from Italy and the U.S. when the law passed, blocking her case.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to be Italian. I want to contribute to Italy and be a citizen,\u2019\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Barry reported from Milan. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ROME — Two U.S. families went to Italy’s highest court Tuesday to challenge the scope of a year-old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5066,2756,318,240,5,4987,356,243],"class_list":{"0":"post-6848","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-italy","8":"tag-5066","9":"tag-article","10":"tag-courts","11":"tag-general-news","12":"tag-italy","13":"tag-legislation","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}