On July 26, 2026, decision n n. 24045/2026, Italy’s Corte Suprema di Cassazione, sitting as the Sezioni Unite, published its decision on the so-called “Minor Issue”: whether a minor child loses Italian citizenship when their parent naturalizes abroad while the child is still underage. For more than a century, Italian courts held that these minors kept their citizenship. Only in recent years did a few rulings question this, creating a conflict that the Sezioni Unite were asked to resolve. The answer: the minor does not lose Italian citizenship, and the line of transmission to their descendants remains intact

Read also Italian Citizenship by Descent: Understanding the “Minor Case Issue“.

The question before the court

The case arose from a family with roots in Veneto. An Italian-born grandmother emigrated to Venezuela, married there, and had a son who — by operation of Venezuelan law — automatically acquired Venezuelan citizenship at birth (iure soli), while simultaneously being Italian by descent (iure sanguinis) through his mother. Years later, while the son was still a minor living with her, the mother naturalized as Venezuelan.

Both the Tribunale di Roma and the Court of Appeal of Rome rejected the family’s citizenship claim, reasoning that the parent’s naturalization had automatically caused the minor son to lose Italian citizenship as well — and that this loss then “broke the chain” of transmission to his own children and grandchildren, the claimants in this case.

The question, AKA known as the “Minor Issue” sent to the Sezioni Unite was deceptively simple but had never been fully settled: which rule governs a child who already held dual citizenship at birth — Article 7 or Article 12 of Law no. 555/1912?

Why article 7 and article 12 are not the same thing

Italy’s historic 1912 citizenship law (still relevant ratione temporis to many pending descent cases) contains two provisions that can look similar on the surface but serve very different purposes:

• Article 7 governs the child who is a dual national from birth — Italian by blood and a foreign citizen by birthplace. This child keeps Italian citizenship for life, with only one way to lose it: a voluntary, express renunciation made after reaching adulthood.
• Article 12, paragraph 2 governs a completely different scenario: a minor who held only Italian citizenship, and who becomes a foreign national as a consequence of a parent’s later, voluntary naturalization abroad, provided the child shares the parent’s residence and actually acquires the foreign citizenship as a result.

The lower courts in this case had applied Article 12 to a child who was never in that second situation — he was bipolide from the moment he was born, long before his parent ever set foot in a naturalization office.

What the Italian Corte di Cassazione Sezioni Unite decided

The Court’s reasoning, in essence, comes down to this:

1. The two provisions are autonomous and cannot be mixed. Article 7 exclusively and comprehensively regulates the position of a person who is bipolide by birth. Article 12 exclusively regulates the position of a minor whose only citizenship was Italian at the time of the parent’s naturalization. One provision cannot be borrowed to resolve a case governed by the other.

2. Citizenship acquired at birth cannot be lost through someone else’s later choice. Citizenship iure sanguinis is, in the Court’s own words, a “permanent and imprescriptible” status. A minor who was already a dual citizen at birth cannot be involuntarily stripped of that status by a parent’s subsequent, voluntary decision to naturalize elsewhere — because Article 8 of the 1912 law makes clear that loss of Italian citizenship requires either a voluntary act by the person concerned, or, for a genuinely non-consenting minor, the specific mechanism set out in Article 12 — which, again, does not apply to someone who was bipolide from birth.

3. Historical sources confirm the point. The Court traced the legislative history back to the grande naturalizzazione of Italian emigrants in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century, the parliamentary debates behind the 1912 law (Senator Vittorio Polacco’s “opting-out” model, which prevailed over Vittorio Scialoja’s rejected “opting-in” alternative), two historical opinions of the Consiglio di Stato (1975 and 1990), and a 2001 Ministry of Foreign Affairs circular — all consistently confirming that a parent’s later naturalization abroad does not affect a child who was already a dual citizen by birth.

4. Gender equality applies retroactively to this scenario too. Building on the Constitutional Court’s landmark 1983 ruling (which struck down the old rule limiting citizenship transmission to children of Italian fathers only), the Sezioni Unite confirmed that maternal-line transmission is fully equivalent to paternal-line transmission — including for the purposes of this specific rule on loss of citizenship. In other words, it makes no difference whether the descent runs through the father or the mother.

5. The 2025 Italian citizenship reform does not apply retroactively to pending judicial claims. The Court reiterated — consistent with Corte Costituzionale judgment no. 63/2026 — that Article 3-bis of Law 91/1992 (introduced by Legge 74/2025) does not apply to judicial applications for recognition of citizenship filed before March 27, 2025. Those cases remain governed entirely by the pre-reform framework.

This interpretation was confirmed again days later by a second Sezioni Unite ruling 24284/2026 on the same issue — read our analysis here

The principles of law set out for lower courts

The Sezioni Unite sent the case back to the Corte d’Appello di Roma with four binding principles to apply on remand:

• The 2025 reform’s restrictions do not apply to judicial claims for recognition of citizenship filed before March 27, 2025.
• A minor born abroad as a dual national from birth (Italian iure sanguinis + foreign iure soli) remains Italian even if the Italian parent later naturalizes or loses Italian citizenship, unless the person themselves later renounces it as an adult.
• Article 12’s “loss by association” rule applies only to a minor who held exclusively Italian citizenship at the time of the parent’s naturalization.
• Full equality between mothers and fathers applies both to the transmission of citizenship at birth and to these consequences of a parent’s loss of citizenship.

What this means for pending litigation

Cases that stalled, were rejected, or seemed unwinnable specifically because of the Minor Issue now have solid ground to be revived, since a Sezioni Unite ruling sets a precedent that lower courts are expected to follow. In the case decided on July 26, the Corte d’Appello di Roma’s original judgment was annulled and sent back for reconsideration under the principles above — and similar reversals should follow in other pending appeals raising the same issue.

What this means for consulate applications

Don’t expect immediate change at the consular level. Consulates and comuni typically need updated internal guidance before adjusting their practice, and there’s no clear timeline for that yet — even though compliance is expected eventually. In practical terms, the Ministero dell’Interno will likely need to issue new guidance superseding its prior circular. Until that happens, some offices may continue applying the older, stricter approach, which in the short term could mean more people need to go to court rather than resolve things administratively.

What stays the same

This ruling has no effect on the two-generation limit introduced by the 2025 reform. The Constitutional Court upheld Legge 74/2025 against constitutional challenges in March 2026, and on July 23, 2026 it referred related questions to the Court of Justice of the EU (Ordinanza n. 147/2026). So for anyone applying after March 27, 2025, that generational limit still fully applies — this favorable outcome on the Minor Issue mainly benefits people with cases already filed, or whose family line already fits within the two-generation limit on its own terms.

What this means if you are applying for Italian citizenship

This ruling applies especially to judicial cases already filed before March 27, 2025.

It covers families where a child was born abroad with dual citizenship from birth — Italian plus a local citizenship (e.g. Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, the US) — and the Italian parent naturalized afterward, while that child was still a minor.

In these cases, the Cassazione says: the child does not lose Italian citizenship, and their descendants can still be recognized

It does not apply if the parent had already naturalized before the child was born — in that case the child was never Italian to begin with, and a different analysis applies

A note on cases after the Italian citizenship law reform – Tajani Decree

It’s worth being clear about a common misconception: this ruling does not help a grandparent or great-grandparent 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 falls under Article 12, not Article 7, and this ruling confirms — rather than changes — that such a loss remains valid, regardless of whether the minor understood or consented to it at the time.

This also means that ascendant, having lost Italian citizenship as a minor, generally cannot satisfy the “exclusively Italian ascendant” exception under the new Article 3-bis of Legge 74/2025 for applications filed on or after March 27, 2025 These cases required a separate evaluation.