Italy's 2025 law, and what's still open
Law 74/2025 closed the great-grandparent line for new applicants. It left a grandfathered group, and it left grandparent-level claims untouched.
For years, Italy’s citizenship-by-descent law (jure sanguinis) had no generational limit: if you could document an unbroken line back to an Italian-born ancestor, however many generations back, and that ancestor never naturalized elsewhere before the next generation was born, you had a claim. That made Italy one of the widest-reaching descent routes anywhere.
Law 74/2025 changed that. As of the cutoff in late March 2025, new applications are limited to two generations - a parent or grandparent born in Italy, not further back. Anyone whose qualifying ancestor is a great-grandparent or beyond, filing after the cutoff, is now closed out under the current rules.
There is a grandfathered group: people who had already filed an application, or booked a consular appointment, before the cutoff. For them, the old unlimited rule still applies. Everyone else in a great-grandparent line is closed under the new rule, full stop - not a low score, not a "maybe with more documents." It is one of the more common disappointments this kind of screening delivers, and stating it plainly matters more than softening it.
What the reform did not touch: grandparent-level and parent-level descent claims, which continue to work exactly as before. If your qualifying ancestor is your grandparent, distance from the 2025 cutoff is irrelevant to your case.