On July 26, 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.

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 if you are applying for Italian citizenship

This ruling applies especially to cases already pending before March 27, 2025 (whether at the consulate or already in court).

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 apply.

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 cased after the Tajnai Decree

There is also a positive angle for applications to be filed under the post-reform rules. If your grandfather or grandmother was born in Italy — or in a country that does not apply ius soli, and so held exclusively Italian citizenship, not dual citizenship from birth — and later lost it as a minor only because their own parent (your great-grandparent) naturalized abroad while they were still a child, this ruling works in your favor. That loss was not a voluntary choice made by your grandfather or grandmother; it was an automatic consequence of their parent’s decision, imposed on them while they had no legal capacity to consent. Because your grandfather or grandmother held exclusively Italian citizenship — never dual — they can still satisfy the “exclusively Italian ascendant” requirement under the new Article 3-bis of Legge 74/2025, even for an application filed on or after March 27, 2025