Sabrina Crawford was waiting on one last document when Italy changed the rules under her. In 2025, just as she was nearing the final hurdle of the Italian citizenship bureaucratic process, Giorgia Meloni’s government enacted a law that stopped access to Italian citizenship through distant ancestry.
For Crawford, the timing was devastating. She had traveled to a village in Calabria as part of her genealogical research and was still waiting for proof that her Italian great-grandfather had not become a US citizen before she could submit her application. Then the new law arrived. “It was as if the sky collapsed,” she said. “This horrible news really upended all of my plans, all of my hopes, all of my goals. It broke my heart.”
The change was not a minor adjustment. Since May last year, only people with a parent or grandparent who was an Italian citizen at birth and who did not take on dual nationality are eligible to apply. That has shut the door on many descendants who had been building cases for years under Italy’s long-running system of citizenship by descent, known as ius sanguinis.
Two US families have now taken the fight to court, arguing the law should apply only to people born after it was enacted. A supreme court panel is expected to decide in the coming weeks, after Italy’s constitutional court ruled in March that the law was valid.
Marco Mellone, who represents the challengers, said the measure should not be applied to people whose claims were already in motion. “This is a crucial point, and the main reason we consider this law to be absolutely unconstitutional and unfair,” he said. “It touches on a [citizenship] right at the time of birth and so it should not be applied retroactively.” He said his clients are invoking rights enshrined in ius sanguinis, the legal principle of right of blood.
Italy’s parliament approved the legislation after the government argued it should reserve citizenship for people with a genuine connection to Italy. Meloni put it bluntly: “We believe that granting citizenship is a serious matter and should be reserved for those with a genuine connection to our nation.” The law was also aimed at reducing claims based on tenuous links to Italy and clearing backlogs in local councils and consulates.
That effort has had serious consequences for thousands of legitimate requests, especially from the US, Brazil and Argentina, where descendants of Italians who left in the 19th and early 20th centuries have long sought citizenship through ancestry. Italy uses 1861, the year of its formation, as the legal starting point for those claims, a system that reflected a global diaspora built by millions of emigrants.
The dispute has also taken on a sharper edge since allegations emerged in 2024 that the Italian consulate in Venezuela illegally granted citizenship to five members of Hezbollah. For supporters of the new law, that scandal underscored the need for tighter rules. For opponents, it has become part of the argument that a broad crackdown has swept up applicants whose ties to Italy are anything but tenuous.
What happens next now turns on the court. If the panel sides with the challengers, it could reopen a path for people who were already deep into the process when the law took effect. If it does not, Crawford and others who spent years documenting family lines back to Italy may find that the finish line has moved for good.