On July 26, 2026, Italy’s Corte Suprema di Cassazione, sitting as the Sezioni Unite Civili, published Sentenza n. 24184/2026 — a second decision reaching the same conclusion as the landmark ruling n. 24045/2026 handed down days earlier: a child born abroad who held dual citizenship from birth (Italian iure sanguinis plus a foreign citizenship iure soli) does not lose Italian citizenship simply because the Italian parent later naturalized abroad while the child was still a minor.

The case behind the ruling

Unlike n. 24045/2026, this second case (R.G. n. 18354/2024) was brought by applicants represented by Avv. Marco Mellone of the Bologna Bar, challenging a judgment of the Corte d’Appello di Roma (n. 1490/2024, deposited March 1, 2024) that had rejected their citizenship claim. As in the first case, the Ministero dell’Interno resisted through the Avvocatura Generale dello Stato, represented at the hearing by Avv. Ilia Massarelli — the same government counsel who appeared in n. 24045/2026, underscoring that the state was defending the identical legal position across both proceedings.

The ricorso raised four separate grounds of appeal (motivi di doglianza), and the Court, as it had in the companion case, found it necessary to resolve only the first, since that ground alone was sufficient to overturn the Corte d’Appello’s judgment and send the matter back for a new decision — a technique known in Italian procedure as assorbimento, where a court that fully upholds one ground of appeal does not need to rule on the others.

The same legal architecture, restated

The reasoning in n. 24184/2026 mirrors, point for point, the interpretive framework built in n. 24045/2026:

• Article 7 of Law 555/1912 governs the child who is a dual citizen from birth. This status is permanent, lost only through a voluntary and explicit renunciation made as an adult — never as an automatic consequence of a parent’s choices.
• Article 12, paragraph 2 governs a distinct and narrower case: a minor who held only Italian citizenship, sharing residence with a parent, who acquires a foreign citizenship as a direct consequence of that parent’s naturalization. The Court is explicit that this provision has no application to a child who already held a second citizenship from the moment of birth.
• The Court traces the same textual and historical grounding for this distinction back to the wording of Articles 1, 7, 8 and 12 of the 1912 law, and to the same body of doctrine and historical administrative practice (Consiglio di Stato opinions of 1975 and 1990, the 2001 Ministry of Foreign Affairs circular) already relied on in the companion ruling — reinforcing that this is not a novel reading invented for one case, but the recovery of a century-old interpretive consensus that had, in the Court’s own words, only recently been disturbed by a handful of departing decisions.
• The Court reaffirms, citing Article 1, paragraph 1 of Law 555/1912 (“è cittadino per nascita il figlio di padre cittadino”), that the constitutional principle of full parity between mothers and fathers in transmitting and preserving citizenship — established by Corte Costituzionale judgments 87/1975 and 30/1983 — applies equally within this framework, regardless of which parent the Italian citizenship descends from.

Where the line still holds

It’s worth being precise about what this ruling does not change. It does not extend the favorable Article 7 reading to a different, less common pattern: an ancestor who was born in Italy — or in a country without ius soli, and so held exclusively Italian citizenship — and lost it as a minor because their own parent naturalized abroad. That scenario remains governed by Article 12, and this ruling confirms, rather than disturbs, that this kind of loss remains valid regardless of the minor’s awareness or consent at the time. Nor does it touch the two-generation limit introduced by the 2025 reform for applications filed on or after March 27, 2025, which continues to apply in full and is currently the subject of a separate reference to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

What this ruling settles, definitively, is narrower and more specific: a child who was already Italian and something else at the moment of birth does not become only “something else” because a parent later chose a second citizenship. A century of Italian legal tradition said as much before a brief and recent departure suggested otherwise.