Italian Citizenship by Descent for Americans: 2025 Rules

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Italian heritage runs deep in the United States. Many Americans can trace a branch of the family back to an Italian town, often through a great-grandparent who crossed the Atlantic a century ago.

If you have wondered whether that link could lead to an Italian passport, know this first: the rules on citizenship by descent changed in 2025. Below we point you to the official pages, and to the family records that are worth finding either way.

Italian Citizenship by Descent: the 2025 Rules

Citizenship by descent is known in Italy as jure sanguinis — Latin for “right of blood.” The rules on it changed in 2025.

Decree-Law No. 36 of 28 March 2025 (in force from 29 March 2025) was made law, with changes, by Law No. 74 of 23 May 2025. It added a new Article 3-bis to Italy’s citizenship law (Law No. 91 of 1992).

The rules on citizenship by descent changed in 2025 (Law No. 74/2025). Read the official page on the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website (Consulate General in Miami shown; use your own consulate’s page). Our free PDF, Italian Citizenship by Descent: the 2025 Rules, sets out what the law now says. Checked October 2026.

Where Family Research Starts

Whether a particular family line leads to Italian citizenship today is a question for the law and your consulate, not for us. What we can help with is the family history: finding your Italian-born ancestor, the town they came from, and the records that link each generation to the next.

For many Italian-American families, that ancestor is a great-grandparent who emigrated in the early 1900s.

The rules changed in 2025 (Law No. 74/2025); see the citizenship section above for the official page and our free guide.

What an Italian Passport Actually Gives You

An Italian passport is an EU passport. That means the right to live, work, and study in any of the 27 European Union member states. It means access to state healthcare and education in countries like Italy, France, and Spain.

It means you can buy property in Italy without the complications that non-EU buyers face. And it means something harder to measure — a legal recognition that you belong to a place your family once called home.

For many Italian-Americans, that last part matters most of all.

The Villages They Came From

Between 1880 and 1920, over four million Italians left for the United States. Most came from the south — Sicily, Calabria, Campania, and Basilicata. Others came from Abruzzo, Veneto, and Friuli.

The villages they left are still there. The church where a great-grandmother was baptised still stands. The family name is still in the records at the local anagrafe — the civil registry office. In some small towns, the surnames in the phone book are the same ones that appear on the Ellis Island manifests.

Many of these villages lost much of their population to emigration. Some towns in Calabria and Sicily now run their own schemes to bring empty houses back into use; if your family’s town has one, its comune website sets out the terms.

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The Growing Return Movement

Some Italian-Americans are not just visiting Italy — they spend long stretches there, and some move for good.

Moving to Italy has its own visa and residence rules, separate from citizenship, and each Italian consulate sets out its visa requirements on its own page.

Some families make that choice. They rent an apartment in the ancestral region, learn the language, and get to know the country their grandparents left.

For many, what stays with them is not any passport but what they find in those records. A baptism certificate from 1882. A marriage entry in handwritten ink. Proof that these people existed, and that they are connected to them.

How to Start

The first step is research. Identify your Italian-born ancestor, then find the town they came from and the records that link each generation from them to you. Before you gather anything for an application, read your consulate’s page on citizenship by descent: the rules changed in 2025 (Law No. 74/2025).

Key documents to gather:

• Birth, marriage, and death certificates for every person in the line from your Italian ancestor to you
• Your ancestor’s naturalisation papers, passenger lists and census entries, which often record their town of origin and dates
• Italian civil records from the home comune — which you can often request by post or email

Applications go to the Italian consulate for the place where you live, and each consulate’s page sets out its own documents. Read that page before you order certificates.

If records are missing or incomplete, write to the civil registry (ufficio di stato civile) of your ancestor’s comune with the names and approximate dates you have.

There are also resources in the Italian immigrant community’s history at Ellis Island that can help trace the original emigrant’s details, including ship manifests that record the town of origin.

More Than a Passport

Standing in the square of the village your ancestors came from, reading their names in a dusty register, is something you do not forget.

Italy kept a record of them. In comune registers and parish books, the baptisms, marriages and departures of the families who left are still there for their descendants to find.

Many Americans have Italian roots, and many have never seen the records that tell their family’s story.

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Plan Your Italy Trip

Ready to visit the country your family came from? The Ultimate Italy Travel Guide covers everything from which regions to visit, how to get around, and what to see — helping you plan the trip of a lifetime back to the old country.

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What No One Tells You Before You Start the Research

Before anything else, read the 2025 rules; see the citizenship section above. The family research is a long job in its own right: gathering certificates, writing to comuni, and discovering that your great-grandfather’s name was spelled differently on every document he ever signed. The people who get furthest are not the ones with the cleanest paperwork. They are the ones who keep going when a comune is slow to answer an email. If you are curious about your family’s story, start now. Not because anything is urgent, but because the research is long.

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