On June 1, 2026, the Tribunal of Bologna issued a ruling that deserves attention not only for its outcome — a rejection — but for something the judge said that goes further than most courts have been willing to state explicitly.

The case involved a Brazilian family claiming Italian citizenship jure sanguinis through descent from an ancestor born in Zocca, in the province of Modena, in 1901. The ancestor had emigrated to Brazil without ever naturalizing or renouncing Italian citizenship. The petition was filed on November 5, 2025 — well after the March 28, 2025 reform deadline. The petitioners were third and fourth-degree descendants of the Italian ancestor, placing them beyond the two-generation limit introduced by Art. 3-bis of Law 91/1992.

The outcome was straightforward on those facts: no formal application had been submitted before the March 27, 2025 deadline, no confirmed consular appointment had been communicated, and the generational limit was clearly exceeded. The petition was rejected. Litigation costs were compensated between the parties, in light of the novelty of the legal questions involved and the recent Constitutional Court ruling.

It is worth noting that the Tribunal of Bologna has not spoken with a single voice on these questions. A favorable ruling from the same court — reportedly issued on April 17, 2026 — had circulated on social media, suggesting that post-reform recognition might be possible in certain circumstances. I have not been able to verify that ruling directly from court documents, and I have therefore not analyzed it here. What I can say is that the June 1 ruling moves deliberately in the opposite direction — and does so with unusual explicitness on the Prenot@mi question.

What makes this decision worth examining separately is a part in the judge’s reasoning that addresses the Prenot@mi question head-on — even though, in this specific case, no Prenot@mi documentation had been produced or even mentioned by the petitioners.

The judge stated that attempts to access the Prenot@mi portal that were unsuccessful due to unavailability of slots would not be relevant — and added that in any case such attempts had not been alleged or documented in these proceedings. The significance of this lies in the structure of the reasoning: the judge did not simply note the absence of evidence and move on. The judge went out of the way to say that such evidence, even if it had been present, would not have changed the outcome.

The reasoning is rooted in a strict reading of Art. 3-bis. The exceptions to the new regime require either a judicial petition, a formal administrative application with complete documentation, or a confirmed consular appointment. These are exhaustive categories. In the Bologna court’s view, preparatory activities — including attempts to book a consular appointment — fall outside all of them. Any interpretation that would extend the exceptions to cover such activities would be impermissibly broad.

This position is directly at odds with the approach taken by the Naples and Palermo courts in the favorable rulings analyzed in my previous article. Those courts treated documented, sustained Prenot@mi attempts as evidence of an intent to initiate the administrative procedure before the deadline — and found this sufficient to satisfy Art. 3-bis letter (a). The Bologna judge rejected that interpretive path entirely, before it was even presented.

One additional element in this ruling is worth noting. The assignment of citizenship cases to honorary judges — rather than tenured judges — is explicitly addressed. The judge cites a CSM resolution of October 23, 2025, which authorized the temporary assignment of citizenship cases to honorary judges until June 30, 2026, specifically to meet PNRR targets. As I noted in my previous article, the intrusion of funding-driven deadlines into judicial proceedings is something that, as a lawyer, I find uncomfortable. Here it appears directly in the court record.

For a detailed analysis of the Naples and Palermo rulings, see: [Italian Citizenship by Descent After Law 74/2025: How Courts Are Deciding]

My reading

The Bologna ruling of June 1 is the clearest judicial statement yet that Prenot@mi attempts — however well documented — do not satisfy the requirements of Art. 3-bis. It does not merely reject a case where such evidence was absent. It pre-emptively addresses and dismisses the argument, signaling that even if the evidence had been there, it would not have mattered.

This does not mean the question is settled. The Constitutional Court session of June 9 and the pending Sezioni Unite ruling may yet establish a different framework. But as of today, courts in Bologna and Brescia are applying the law as written, while courts in Naples and Palermo have been willing to read a protective principle into the gap the Constitutional Court left open. Both positions are coherent. Only the higher courts can resolve which one prevails.

Sources: Trib. Bologna, RG 15701/2025, June 1, 2026; Corte Cost., Sentenza n. 63/2026, April 30, 2026; CSM, delibera October 23, 2025.