Your result
Italy — Naturalization
Possible
Naturalisation is a residence route, and there is no version of it that works from abroad. Every term — two years, three, four, five or ten — counts registered legal residence in Italy. Visits, property, a holiday home, tax paid to Italy and family there do not substitute for it.
That is worth saying clearly because it is the single most common wrong assumption about Italian citizenship, and because the routes that do work from abroad are different ones.
What those are. Citizenship by descent needs no residence at all — but since 24 May 2025 it also needs a close link, which usually means a parent or grandparent who held Italian citizenship and no other nationality on the day you were born. Marriage to an Italian citizen works from abroad too: three years from the wedding, halved to eighteen months if you have children together. And if your family came from Istria, Fiume or Dalmatia, there is a separate route for the ceded territories that the 2025 reform does not appear to touch and that has no generational limit.
If moving is genuinely on the table, the number that matters is which term you would be on. Ten years is the default. Two, if a parent or grandparent was an Italian citizen by birth — and if that is true of you, the descent route is worth ruling out first, because it would be faster and would not require the move. Four, if you hold another EU citizenship.
And if the aim is to get there and start counting: the digital nomad permit has been accepting applications since March 2026, it needs no Italian employer, and unlike some equivalents elsewhere the time on it is ordinary legal residence that counts towards all of this.
Tell us where you are, whether there is Italian ancestry in your family and whether a move is realistic, and we will tell you which door is actually yours.