Italy’s constitutional court upheld the Meloni government’s decree last month, but Mellone argued the Court of Cassation retains authority to clarify the law’s scope. The panel’s ruling, expected within weeks, will be binding on lower courts and could determine citizenship eligibility for an untold number of diaspora claimants whose applications were suspended when the restriction took effect.
ROME — Two American families argued before Italy’s Court of Cassation on Tuesday that a 2025 law curtailing citizenship by ancestry should not apply to people whose lineage predates its enactment, in a challenge that could restore an Italian citizenship path for millions of diaspora descendants across the United States and Latin America.
Attorney Marco Mellone appeared before an expanded panel of the court, arguing that a decree enacted by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government in March 2025 should govern only people born after it took effect. A separate attorney represented Venezuelan descendants of Italian immigrants at the same hearing. The panel’s ruling, expected within weeks, will be binding on lower courts.
Italy’s constitutional court upheld the Meloni government’s decree last month. Mellone argued, however, that the Court of Cassation retains authority to clarify the law’s reach — specifically, whether it bars claims from people whose ancestry and connections to Italy were established before the decree’s effective date.
Background
The March 2025 decree halted rules that had allowed anyone who could document Italian ancestry dating to the country’s formation in 1861 to apply for citizenship. The restriction narrowed eligibility to descendants no more than two generations removed from an Italian-born ancestor, suspending applications from a far broader class of claimants.
Mellone’s case concerns descendants of the roughly 14 million Italians who emigrated between 1877 and 1914, according to figures from Italy’s Foreign Ministry. He described the families before the court as straightforward heirs of that migration wave, telling reporters before the hearing that they were invoking a right of citizenship that had existed before the government curtailed it, according to the Associated Press.
About a dozen people whose applications were suspended by the law gathered outside the court in solidarity with the two families at the center of the legal action.
The claimants
Karen Bonadio brought photographs of herself as a young child with her Italian-born great-grandparents — who emigrated from Basilicata in southern Italy to upstate New York — along with their birth certificates. She told the AP she hopes one day to move to Italy, and said the new law treats a documented multigenerational family connection as legally insufficient.
Jennifer Daley, a historian from Salina, Kansas, has been navigating Italian administrative channels for her citizenship claim for nearly a decade. Her grandfather, Giuseppe Dalfollo, emigrated from the province of Trento in 1912 — when the region was still under Austro-Hungarian control — later married an Italian woman, and eventually became a naturalized American citizen. Daley told the AP that the citizenship claim represents a recognition of identity that goes beyond a legal document.
Alexis Traino, 34, was waiting on documents from both countries when the law passed, freezing her application. Traino said she grew up with a strong sense of Italian identity and has great-grandparents from Italy on both sides of her family. She now lives primarily in Florence and told the AP she wants to contribute to Italy as a citizen.
At least one of the cases Mellone is pursuing had been rejected in lower courts before the new law was enacted, based in part on rulings holding that Italian emigrants who adopted another citizenship before having children cannot transmit Italian citizenship to those children.