ROME — Two U.S. families went before Italy's Cassation Court in Rome to challenge the scope of a year-old law passed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government that limits citizenship claims to Italian descendants removed by more than two generations. A decision by an expanded panel of the court, which would make the ruling binding in lower courts, is expected in the coming weeks.

Lawyer Marco Mellone argued that the law should apply only to people born after it took effect, a position that could open a pathway to citizenship for millions of people living in the United States and parts of Latin America. Another lawyer represented Italian descendants from Venezuela before the court.

"Today they are invoking their right to Italian citizenship," Mellone said. According to Foreign Ministry statistics, his case would clarify the citizenship rights of the descendants of some 14 million Italians who emigrated between 1877 and 1914. One of Mellone's citizenship cases was rejected in lower courts before the new law, based in part on rulings that Italian emigrants who acquired another citizenship before having children cannot pass on Italian citizenship.

In March 2025, the government issued a decree that halted previous rules allowing anyone who could prove ancestry after Italy's formation in 1861 to seek Italian citizenship. In March 2026, Italy's constitutional court ruled that the new law limiting citizenship claims by descent was valid.

Another dozen people whose citizenship claims were stopped by the law were present outside the courthouse in solidarity. Among them was Karen Bonadio, who brought photos of herself as a young girl alongside her Italian-born great-grandparents, who emigrated from Basilicata in southern Italy to upstate New York, along with their birth certificates. She said she hopes to move to Italy one day based on her ancestry. "The new law says all these great-grandchildren didn't know their great-grandparents." Bonadio said.

Jennifer Daley's citizenship case has been working its way through the Italian bureaucracy for nearly a decade. Her ancestor Giuseppe Dalfollo immigrated to the United States in 1912 from the province of Trento when it was under Austro-Hungarian control, later married an Italian woman whom he brought to the U.S., and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Daley, a historian, said she always had a strong Italian identity that transcended her anglicized last name.

"It is truly a recognition of who I am, where I am from. It's so much more than citizenship. It's everything," Daley said.