Your result
Italy — Naturalization
Possible
You are on the ordinary route, which is ten years of registered legal residence, and you have told us you are somewhere between two and ten. So this is a clock rather than a closed door, and the useful thing is knowing exactly where you are on it.
Worth stating plainly, because a lot of what is written about this is out of date. In June 2025 Italy held a referendum on cutting this term from ten years to five. It failed — not because people voted against it, but because turnout fell short of the fifty per cent quorum, so the result was void and the ten years stand. Commentary written in the run-up to that vote, and a good deal written since, still assumes otherwise. Nothing has changed and nothing is scheduled to.
What decides your case is continuity rather than total time. What counts is unbroken registration with a comune. A gap does not pause the count — it restarts it. If you have moved between comuni, spent a year deregistered, or had a period where your residence lapsed between permits, that is where your ten years will be challenged, and it is much better to find it now than at year nine.
Two things that would take you off this route entirely, both worth ruling out rather than assuming. If a parent or grandparent is or was an Italian citizen by birth, your term is two years, not ten — and the wording covers an ancestor who held Italian citizenship by birth and later lost it. If you hold another EU citizenship, it is four. Either would change your life by several years, and people reach the end of the ten-year route without ever having checked.
Whatever the term, three things are required of everyone and all three are worth starting early. A B1 Italian certificate from one of the four recognised providers — a real exam, with sittings that book out. Proof of adequate income across the three years before you apply. And a clean record, with certificates from Italy and from every country you have lived in as an adult. Those last ones expire, so they come last; the language certificate does not, so it comes first.
And one thing that is not a requirement but decides most cases: continuity. What counts is unbroken registration with a comune. A gap — a year deregistered, a move handled badly, a period nobody recorded — does not pause the clock, it restarts it.
Send us the date your residence was first registered and every gap you know of, and we will tell you what date you are actually working towards.