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Law Decree 36/2025 collapsed the great-grandparent route, and the Constitutional Court's 2026 ruling left the new limit largely intact. Files logged before 27 March 2025 keep the old regime. Files opened after it face a different country. Here's what the honest read looks like for an HNWI with Italian ancestry.
Italy has spent the last year rewriting a citizenship regime that had been essentially unchanged since 1912. Law Decree 36/2025, signed on 28 March 2025 and converted into law that May, cut the historical no-limit jus sanguinis chain down to a two-generation door. The Constitutional Court's June 2026 ruling on the challenges to that decree kept the core restriction in place. What this means, in practical terms, is that most descent files that were still theoretically alive on 27 March 2025 are now closed on the substance, and the entire strategy for an HNWI client with Italian ancestry has to be rebuilt.
Before 28 March 2025, an applicant could claim Italian citizenship if any direct ancestor was an Italian citizen at the time of the applicant's birth and the chain of transmission had not been broken by naturalisation before the next generation was born. The famous "1948 rule" for maternal lines and the "grandfather naturalised too early" exclusion were the main friction points, not the number of generations. In principle a great-great-grandparent worked, and applications filed on that basis were regularly granted.
The Tajani decree replaced that with a hard two-generation limit. To claim by descent now, at least one parent or grandparent has to have been born in Italy, or an ancestor within that same window has to have been an Italian citizen at the applicant's birth under narrow re-defined conditions. Great-grandparents alone are no longer enough. The change is not a tightening of procedure. It is the deletion of the entire back-tail of the diaspora file base.
The decree carved out a transition rule for applications physically filed before 27 March 2025 at the consulate, prefecture, or the applicant's Italian municipality of ancestry. Those files stay under the old regime, are processed under the old regime, and are decided under the old regime. The backlog was already large, and the transition rule fixed the population at the March 2025 cutoff, so wait times have only gone up.
For most other clients, the working assumption is that if the file was not physically logged by 27 March 2025, it now needs to fit inside the two-generation window or a different route entirely.
Judgment 142/2025 (issued at the end of 2025 and finalised in June 2026) upheld the two-generation limit against constitutional challenge. The Court found that Italy has a legitimate interest in requiring a genuine link between the citizen and the state, and that the two-generation rule sits within Parliament's discretion in defining that link. It did not, however, uphold every procedural change in the decree, and some collateral provisions on documentation and interview requirements were sent back for revision.
The read across is that the substantive rule is stable. Anyone waiting for the Court to unwind the whole reform can stop waiting. The margin for further litigation is now around procedure, not around the eligibility rule itself.
Three routes remain for a client who cared about Italian citizenship and was locked out by the 2025 cutoff.
The first is the residency-then-naturalisation route. Any non-EU national can naturalise after ten years of legal residence, EU nationals after four, spouses of Italian citizens after two to three depending on children. This is not a shortcut; it is a rebuilt file that lands a passport at the end of a full residency period. For HNWI clients who value Italian ancestry as identity rather than as a shortcut, it holds up.
The second is the elective residence visa, which is available to non-EU applicants who can show passive income of roughly EUR 32,000 per year (single) and buy or lease adequate housing. It runs residency without work rights and folds into the ten-year clock.
The third is a look at whether the applicant qualifies under the pre-decree rule on transition (usually not), or whether a parent or grandparent's file is worth filing under the two-generation door before the applicant's own. Once the intermediate ancestor holds Italian citizenship, the applicant becomes second-generation and back in scope.
The number of HNWI files still viable under the pure descent route is a small fraction of what it was two years ago. Argentina, Brazil, and the US together held most of the diaspora base that treated Italian ancestry as an accessible EU passport, and the two-generation limit removes the vast majority of those. Buyer's-eye view: if your file was not physically at a consulate by March 2025, you should assume the descent route is closed and re-plan around residency or around a different EU option.
The alternatives that hold up best in 2026 are Ireland's Foreign Births Register for clients with an Irish-born grandparent, Germany's post-2024 no-generation-limit rule for clients with unbroken chain, and residency programs (Portugal D7 and Portugal Golden Visa now-tightened, Greece Golden Visa, Spain if the Democratic Memory Law tail still applies to the file). We'll cover each of those in the sister posts to this one; the near-term take on Italy is that the honest advice has flipped, and pretending it hasn't is not a service.
If you have an Italian file already filed before March 2025, or if you're weighing whether one of these alternative routes is the right rebuild, send us the basics through our contact form. We'll come back the same week with a written position and a realistic timeline.