Italian Jure Sanguinis After the Tajani Law: What Actually Changed

If you grew up hearing that any Italian-American could claim Italian citizenship, that story used to be roughly true. Italy was, for decades, the most open citizenship-by-descent regime in the Western world — unlimited generations, no parental language test, no residency required, and no cap on how far back in the family tree you could reach, provided the chain of transmission was never broken by an ancestor’s naturalization.

That changed on March 28, 2025, when the Italian Council of Ministers issued Decree-Law 36/2025, better known as the Tajani reform, after Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani. Parliament converted the decree to Law 74/2025 on May 23, 2025 (Normattiva — Decree-Law 36/2025). What the reform did — and did not do — is the single most important thing to understand before you spend money on an Italian citizenship application in 2026.

This post is written for the person googling “am I still eligible for Italian citizenship after the 2025 law?”. It is sourced directly from the decree text on Normattiva, cross-checked against the Wikipedia summary of Italian nationality law, and written against the primary-source research Second Pass maintains internally on Italian citizenship rules. Nothing here is legal advice.

The one-paragraph summary

The Tajani reform added Article 3-bis to Law 91/1992. Under Article 3-bis, a person born abroad who also holds another citizenship is deemed never to have acquired Italian citizenship unless at least one of three narrow exemptions applies. The practical effect is that most great-grandparent-based claims, and many grandparent claims where the Italian ancestor was a dual citizen, are no longer processed by consulates. Applications filed before March 28, 2025 are being processed under the prior rules. The 1948 court route through the Tribunale di Roma has not been eliminated, but its future is being actively litigated.

What Article 3-bis actually says

Article 3-bis sets out three exemption conditions. You qualify if any one of these is true:

1. Pre-reform filing. Your recognition application (or, in the strict reading, your recognition application with consular appointment booked) was on file by March 27–28, 2025. The exact cutoff is being litigated but the decree’s effective date is March 28, 2025.
2. Exclusively Italian ancestor within two generations. A parent or grandparent of yours holds — or held, at the relevant point — exclusively Italian citizenship. “Exclusively” is the word that matters. A grandparent who naturalized as a US citizen is not exclusively Italian. A grandparent who lived their whole life in Italy with only Italian citizenship is.
3. Parent domiciled in Italy for two years before your birth. A parent of yours was domiciled in Italy as an Italian citizen for at least two consecutive years before you were born or adopted.

If none of those three apply, and you were born abroad with another citizenship, Article 3-bis treats you as if you had never been Italian in the first place.

What the reform did NOT do

• It did not change the chain-break rule. The old principle that an ancestor who naturalized as a US citizen before the next descendant’s birth broke the chain of transmission is still in force. If your great-grandfather naturalized in 1925 and your grandfather was born in 1927, the chain was already broken in 1925 regardless of the Tajani reform.
• It did not touch the 1948 court route — directly. Italian citizenship passed only through the paternal line for children born before January 1, 1948, the date Italy’s Republican Constitution took effect. Since Court of Cassation Sentence 4466/2009, Italian courts have granted these “1948 cases” when filed in Rome. The Tajani reform did not explicitly address these court filings. Early post-reform rulings from the Tribunale di Roma have been inconsistent, and practitioners are waiting for appellate guidance.
• It did not kill dual citizenship. Italy still does not require you to renounce your US passport. The reform restricts who qualifies in the first place, not what happens to qualified applicants afterward.
• It did not touch marriage-based citizenship — though a separate Senate bill, Draft Law 1450/2025, is circulating amendments that would tighten the marriage-abroad route. Status unverified as of April 2026; we’re monitoring.
• It did not create a new 2-year naturalization fast-track for descendants who were boxed out by the cap. That claim was circulating in late 2025 and has been retracted from our research as unverified — no such provision exists in the Normattiva text of DL 36/2025. If you saw this on a competitor’s blog, treat it with caution.

Who is still in (and who is out)

Likely still qualified (examples — not a substitute for the quiz):

• Italian parent who held only Italian citizenship at your birth.
• Italian grandparent who never naturalized abroad, whose child (your parent) was born in Italy.
• A 1948 maternal-line case with a pre-1948 birth — filed as a court case in Rome, not as a consular application, with counsel who understands the post-Tajani landscape.
• An application filed and documented before March 28, 2025, sitting in a consulate queue.

Likely boxed out by the reform:

• American-born descendants of an Italian great-grandparent who was an Italian immigrant to the US. This was the most common historical fact pattern — and it is the one the reform was specifically designed to close.
• Descendants of an Italian-American dual-citizen parent or grandparent, where the Italian ancestor had acquired US citizenship at any point.
• Anyone who started a consular recognition application after March 28, 2025 without a qualifying exemption.

Unsettled:

• 1948 cases filed after March 28, 2025. Italian courts are interpreting whether Article 3-bis applies to constitutional-remedy filings. Some early rulings say yes; some say no. Plan for 12–24 months of uncertainty.

What to do if you were boxed out

1. Get an honest eligibility read before spending anything. Lawyers who charge $5,000–$15,000 just to tell you if you qualify are monetizing the confusion around the reform. A legitimate assessment takes 30 minutes if you know what to ask.
2. Pull your Italian ancestor’s US naturalization records early. USCIS A-Files and NARA certificates of non-existence are the single most decisive documents in an Italian descent case. Order them before you spend anything on legal counsel.
3. Consider other descent pathways. If your ancestry is mixed, you may qualify through a different line. Irish, German (including Article 116(2) restoration), Polish, Hungarian, and Lithuanian descent are all paths Second Pass covers. Germany’s naturalization reform kept the 5-year track + dual citizenship. Canada’s Bill C-3 restored eligibility for “lost Canadians” whose claims had been blocked by the first-generation limit.
4. If the line is pre-1948 and maternal, talk to an Italian court-route attorney who has filed cases after March 28, 2025. The 1948 route is narrower and slower than it was, but it is not dead.

A note on sources

Everything above is sourced from primary documents. If a blog post on Italian citizenship does not link to Normattiva, the Ministry of Interior, or a court judgment, treat it the way you’d treat a medical article that doesn’t cite a study. Second Pass publishes fetch dates on every claim internally — if you ask about a specific case, we can show you the source and when it was last verified.

Sources for this post:

• Normattiva — Decree-Law 36/2025 — fetched 2026-04-14
• Ministry of Interior — Italian citizenship — fetched 2026-04-14
• Normattiva — Law 91/1992 — fetched 2026-04-14

Find out where you actually stand

Our free eligibility quiz runs your family story through the current Italian rules (and twelve other countries). It takes five minutes, there is no paywall, and we show you the answer — including the edge cases where the answer is “not through Italy, but check Ireland / Germany / Canada.”

→ Take the Second Pass eligibility quiz

This post is informational and not legal advice. Italian citizenship cases turn on specific documents and dates. If your situation is edge-case, we route you to counsel; we do not pretend to replace one.