The challenge at Italy’s top court put citizenship rules for descendants of emigrants into the spotlight as two U.S. families urged the Cassation Court in Rome to interpret a year-old law more narrowly. The families went to the hearing on Tuesday as Italy’s highest court weighs how far the government’s tightened citizenship-by-descent limits reach, and how those limits apply to people living abroad.
The law they are challenging, passed by the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, restricts citizenship claims based on lineage to Italian descendants removed by more than two generations. A decree in March 2025 set those changes in place, and it marked a shift from previous rules that allowed people who could prove ancestry after Italy’s formation in 1861 to pursue citizenship.
At the hearing, attorney Marco Mellone argued that the Cassation Court should limit the law’s effect to people born after it took effect, a move that Mellone said could open a pathway to citizenship for “millions of people” living in the United States and parts of Latin America. Mellone said the families in the case were descendants of an Italian ancestor who emigrated in the late 19th century to the United States, “like millions of other people, of other Italians,” and he said they were invoking “their right to Italian citizenship.”
Mellone’s argument aimed at clarifying the scope of a rule that Italy’s constitutional court had upheld. Although Italy’s constitutional court ruled last month that the new law is valid, Mellone said the supreme court still has the power to clarify how the law applies. The Cassation Court’s decision is expected in the coming weeks, and the hearing was heard by an expanded panel whose ruling will be binding in lower courts.
Outside the courthouse, supporters gathered in solidarity with the families, including several people whose own citizenship claims were affected after the law changed. Karen Bonadio said she hopes to move to Italy on the strength of her ancestry, bringing photographs of her childhood alongside the birth certificates of her Italian-born great-grandparents, who emigrated from Basilicata in southern Italy to upstate New York. Bonadio described what she said the new law implies about her lineage, showing a photograph she said captured her as a young child in 1963.
Another case presented to the court involved Jennifer Daley, whose request for citizenship has been tied up with Italian authorities for nearly a decade. Daley said her grandfather, Giuseppe Dalfollo, immigrated to the United States in 1912 from the northern province of Trento—then under Austro-Hungarian control—and later married an Italian woman and brought her over. Daley said she became a U.S. citizen at some point, and she said her Italian identity ran deeper than her family name after it was anglicized through U.S. immigration processes. Speaking by phone from Salina, Kansas, Daley described the application as “truly a recognition of who I am, where I am from,” and said it was “so much more than citizenship.”
Alexis Traino, who was among those waiting for documents from Italy and the United States after the law blocked her case, said her connection to Italy is personal and long rooted. She said her great-grandparents came from Italy on both sides of her family, and she described a strong upbringing in which her parents emphasized that connection, saying, “I want to be Italian. I want to contribute to Italy and be a citizen.”
This story was updated on Apr. 15, 2026 to correct the spellings of the names of a U.S. citizen seeking Italian citizenship and her grandfather. It is Jennifer Daley, not Jennifer Daly, and Giuseppe Dalfollo, not Giuseppe Dallfollo. Daley is a historian, rather than a retired history professor.