Italy sent its citizenship crackdown to Europe's highest court, and it is still fully in force while you wait

In July 2026, Italy's Constitutional Court did something it rarely does with a citizenship case this contested. Instead of ruling on whether the country's new two-generation limit on citizenship by descent holds up, it suspended its own proceedings and sent the question to the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg. That case, now filed under the placeholder name Picuso as Case C-816/26, will not be decided quickly, and the law it concerns does not pause while it waits. Article 3-bis of Italy's citizenship law, the provision that cut off automatic recognition beyond a parent or grandparent, remains the operative rule for every application filed today. If part of your plan for Italy has been hoping this law gets struck down, you are planning around a ruling that realistically will not exist for another one to two years, and might not go the way you hope even then.

What Law 74/2025 actually changed

The story starts with a decree-law the Meloni government issued on 28 March 2025, converted into Law No. 74/2025 and published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale on 23 May 2025. Before it, Italy recognised citizenship by descent, jure sanguinis, through an unbroken chain of ancestors with no limit on how many generations back you could go, provided none of them had naturalised elsewhere before the next generation was born. That is the rule that let people in Argentina and Brazil, where Italian emigration ran deep for a century, trace a claim through a great-grandparent or further and expect it to be recognised automatically. Article 3-bis ended that. A new application now needs a parent or a grandparent, and no one further back, who held only Italian citizenship and never took on another nationality. Anyone whose closest qualifying ancestor sits three or more generations away lost an automatic claim they might have spent years assuming was safe.

The law did carry one safeguard, and it matters if you or a relative acted before the change landed. Applications filed with complete documentation at an Italian consulate, a comune, or a court on or before 27 March 2025 continue to be assessed under the old, unlimited rule. Reports at the time put the number of cases protected this way at somewhere around sixty thousand, filed in the narrow window between the decree and its formal cutoff date. Everyone who filed after that date, or who has not filed at all, is judged under the two-generation rule as it now stands, no matter how well documented an older ancestor's citizenship might be.

Why Italy's own top court did not just decide

The first constitutional challenge to Article 3-bis looked, for a moment, like it had settled the question. On 11 and 12 March 2026 the Constitutional Court heard and then rejected that challenge, and its formal Judgment No. 63/2026, deposited 30 April 2026 and published 6 May 2026, held that the two-generation limit is compatible with the Italian Constitution. The Court's reasoning was narrow but clear: the Constitution does not oblige the state to recognise citizenship by descent across an unbroken, unlimited chain of ancestors, so Parliament was free to draw a line somewhere. For a few months, that looked like the end of the legal challenge to Law 74/2025.

It was not. A separate case referred by the Tribunal of Mantova raised a different argument, one grounded not in Italy's own Constitution but in EU citizenship principles, since an Italian passport is also an EU passport and the two-generation cutoff affects how people acquire rights that reach beyond Italy's borders. The Constitutional Court held a public hearing on that question on 9 June 2026, and rather than ruling on it directly, announced on 23 July 2026 that it was suspending its own proceedings and referring the matter to the Court of Justice of the European Union under Order No. 147/2026. The case is now pending before the CJEU as Case C-816/26, and Article 3-bis stays fully in force for as long as that takes, which preliminary references to Luxembourg have recently averaged close to seventeen months to resolve. Lawyers following the case put a realistic range at twelve to twenty-four months before an answer comes back, and even then the matter returns to Italy's own Constitutional Court to apply whatever the CJEU decides. Nothing about this process is fast, and nothing about it is guaranteed to reopen the door Law 74/2025 closed.

If your claim runs deeper than a grandparent

Anyone whose qualifying ancestor is a parent or grandparent is untouched by any of this. That part of the old rule survived intact, and Law 74/2025 was never aimed at you. The real question sits with people whose claim runs through a great-grandparent or further back, and for that group the honest position has two parts. If your application, or a family member's application on the same line, was filed complete and on time before 27 March 2025, you are still being assessed under the old unlimited-generation rule, and the pending CJEU case changes nothing about that file either way. If it was not filed by then, the automatic route is closed under the law as it stands, and the case now in Luxembourg is a possibility worth tracking, not a plan worth building a move around. Some lawyers are still filing narrower court challenges on individual facts, but doing that honestly, rather than as a way of avoiding the two-generation rule altogether, is a decision that needs a lawyer who has read your specific documents, not a general article.

The two routes into Italy that were never about ancestry

None of this touches the two paths into Italy that do not run through a family tree at all, and both are worth knowing honestly because they are slower but far more certain. After five years of continuous, lawful residence in Italy, with no single absence abroad longer than six months and no more than ten months away in total across the five years, you can apply for the EU long-term residence permit, the permesso di soggiorno UE per soggiornanti di lungo periodo, sometimes still called by its older name, the carta di soggiorno. It requires Italian at A2 level, proof of adequate housing, and an income roughly in line with Italy's annual social-assistance threshold, a little over seven thousand euros a year as of 2026. It does not make you a citizen, but it grants rights close to an EU national's inside Italy and makes it meaningfully easier to move toward long-term residence elsewhere in the EU later.

Ordinary naturalisation by residence takes longer: ten years of lawful residence for most non-EU nationals, with Italian at B1 level, proof of income, a clean criminal record, and an application that the Ministry of the Interior officially processes in twenty-four to thirty-six months, though busy prefectures in Rome, Milan and Turin are running closer to four years in practice. That ten-year figure has already survived one direct attempt to change it. In June 2025, Italians voted on a referendum to cut it to five years, and the proposal failed, not on its merits but on turnout: roughly 30 percent of eligible voters showed up, well short of the 50 percent quorum a constitutional referendum needs to bind anything. Ten years is still the number, and nothing currently before any court, in Italy or in Luxembourg, is aimed at changing it.

What this actually means for your plan

If you hold a parent's or grandparent's Italian citizenship, nothing in this entire dispute reaches you. If your claim runs further back and you filed before 27 March 2025, your file sits under the old rule regardless of what Luxembourg eventually decides, and the honest move is to keep pursuing it exactly as before. If your claim runs further back and you did not file in time, the door Law 74/2025 closed is genuinely closed for now, and a case pending in a foreign court that will not report back for a year or two, after which it still has to go back through Rome, is not a foundation to plan a move on. What is solid, whether or not you have any Italian ancestry at all, is that five years of real residence still gets you an EU long-term permit, and ten years still gets you a passport, on rules that no referendum and no referral has managed to touch.

Italian citizenship and immigration law is genuinely in motion, with one Constitutional Court judgment, one referral to the CJEU and one failed referendum inside the same eighteen months. Confirm the current state of any specific rule, and get your own documentation reviewed, before relying on the figures here.