The Case
A Syrian family arrived in Italy in 2018 through humanitarian corridors and settled in Trento, where they were immediately granted refugee status. The father began the naturalization process in 2023, having completed the five years of residency required by law for refugees. A presidential decree granted him Italian citizenship on 24 March 2025, but due to the municipality’s organizational constraints, the oath ceremony was scheduled only for 5 June 2025 — after the new citizenship law had come into force.
The municipality then recognized Italian citizenship for the two twins born in Italy in 2023, but denied it to the other four children, born in Syria and resident in Trento since 2018. Same family, same father who had become Italian: two different outcomes.
The family appealed to the civil court. The father fell seriously ill and died before the ruling. The judge nonetheless recognized citizenship for the four children, clarifying that the father’s death changed nothing: the right had already arisen at the moment the legal conditions were met.
Legal expert commentary
This ruling clarifies an interpretation that the Ministry of the Interior had pushed too far. The 2025 reform does contain a reference to Article 14, but reading it in isolation — without considering the broader legal framework — led to consequences the legislator never intended.
The court in Trento looked at the law as a whole and reached the only coherent conclusion: the restrictions introduced by the reform apply exclusively to citizenship by descent, not to naturalization. For families who have lived, worked and raised their children in Italy for years, this is not just a legal victory — it is the recognition of a right that was always there. The judge’s reasoning is rigorous, consistent with the Constitutional Court’s own position, and strong enough to hold up in any civil court across Italy
What the Italian Citizenship law 2025 reform says
Legislative Decree no. 36 of 2025, converted into Law no. 74 of 2025, was designed to address a specific problem: limiting the automatic transmission of Italian citizenship by descent to people born abroad for generations — often in South America or the United States — with no real connection to Italy. The so-called “Italian descendants” phenomenon had over time produced a kind of virtual citizenship, activatable without any time or generational limits, a legacy of the mass emigration waves of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The reform’s main instrument is the new Article 3-bis of Law 91/1992. The provision establishes that anyone born abroad holding another citizenship is considered as if they had never acquired Italian citizenship, unless a direct ancestor (parent or grandparent) held exclusively Italian citizenship, or unless the parent had resided in Italy for at least two consecutive years after obtaining citizenship and before the child’s birth abroad.
The problem arose because Article 3-bis explicitly applies as an exception to Article 14 as well — the longstanding provision that automatically grants Italian citizenship to minor children living with a parent who becomes naturalized. The Ministry of the Interior, through a series of 2025 circulars, interpreted this exception broadly: the restrictions apply to the foreign-born children of naturalized parents too. This means that anyone who arrived in Italy together with their children — as virtually every immigrant family does — can never meet the requirement of two years of residency before their children’s birth, since those children already existed before the family’s arrival.
The court’s reasoning
The Trento judge dismantled this interpretation on two levels.
On a systematic level, the court observed that the wording of Article 3-bis — “considered as if they had never acquired citizenship” — is only logically coherent when applied to citizenship transmitted by bloodline. Only in that case is it possible to look back to someone’s birth and say that a legal status never arose. Naturalization works in an entirely different way: citizenship comes into being at a specific moment in the present, after years of documented residency and integration. There is nothing to retroactively erase.
The court also cited the very recent Constitutional Court ruling no. 63 of 2026, which described Article 3-bis as a corrective provision specifically targeting the phenomenon of Italian descendants holding “virtual and unrecognized” citizenship. The Constitutional Court had already confined the scope of that provision to that specific phenomenon.
The judge further highlighted the practical absurdity of the Ministry’s interpretation: if the two-year residency requirement before a child’s birth were applied to naturalized parents as well, Article 14 would effectively be nullified for every parent who arrived in Italy with children already born. Paradoxically, the same converting law had strengthened Article 14 by introducing a two-year residency requirement for the minor child. You cannot strengthen a provision and simultaneously abolish it.
On a literal level, Article 3-bis explicitly lists every provision it overrides. All other provisions listed concern citizenship acquired at birth, through parentage, adoption, or the reacquisition of citizenship originally obtained by descent. The reference to Article 14 must be read within the same scope: it applies where Article 14 operates within the framework of jus sanguinis, not when someone acquires citizenship for the first time through naturalization.
What changes in practice
The case of the four Syrian minors is therefore governed solely by Article 14 in its updated form, which requires cohabitation with the parent and at least two years of lawful residency in Italy at the time of the parent’s naturalization. All four children meet both requirements: resident in Trento since 2018, living with their father throughout the entire period.
The ruling carries significance well beyond this single case. The Ministry’s interpretation had blocked or suspended thousands of applications across Italy involving minors who grew up in the country but were born abroad. The Trento court clearly states that this reading is legally wrong, grounding its reasoning in established interpretive principles and aligning with the Constitutional Court’s own position.
Anyone in a similar situation — citizenship denied or suspended for children born abroad to a naturalized parent — now has solid grounds to challenge the decision before the ordinary civil court.
