On 26 July 2026, the Sezioni Unite of the Italian Court of Cassation published judgment no. 24045/2026 and ended a two year fight that had killed thousands of Italian citizenship claims.

The holding, in one sentence: a child who was born abroad holding both Italian citizenship by descent and a foreign citizenship by birth did not lose Italian citizenship when a parent naturalized during that child’s minority.

If your file was rejected because your great-grandfather naturalized in 1928 while your grandmother, born in Ohio, was fourteen years old, the interpretation that killed your case has been overruled by the highest authority in the Italian civil courts.

That is the good news, and it is real. Now here is the part most of the coverage published last week is skipping: this ruling does not reopen the consulate route, does not cancel the Ministry of the Interior’s 2024 circolare, and does not touch the generational limits imposed by the 2025 reform. Whether it helps you personally depends almost entirely on one date and one procedural fact.

Key takeaways

• The ruling: Corte di Cassazione, Sezioni Unite Civili, sentenza n. 24045 of 26 July 2026 (hearing 14 April 2026), with companion judgment n. 24184/2026 confirming the same principles.
• The core holding: Under Article 7 of Law 555/1912, a minor who was a dual citizen from birth kept Italian citizenship despite a parent’s foreign naturalization. Article 12 only ever applied to minors who held Italian citizenship exclusively.
• Mothers count equally. The Court extended full maternal-paternal equality to the consequences of a parent’s loss of citizenship, not just to transmission.
• It applies in court immediately. Pending judicial cases must be decided under this principle.
• It does not restore consular filings. Circolare 43347/2024 stands until the Ministry replaces it.
• It does not defeat the Tajani reform. Article 3-bis and its generational cutoff are a separate battle, now sitting in Luxembourg.

Where the minor issue came from

Italian citizenship between 1 July 1912 and 15 August 1992 was governed by Law 555/1912. Two of its articles ended up in tension.

Article 7 dealt with the child born abroad who acquired a foreign citizenship at birth by jus soli. That child was Italian by blood and foreign by soil from day one, and Article 7 protected that dual status, leaving the child free to renounce Italian citizenship only after reaching majority.

Article 12 dealt with loss. It provided that unemancipated minor children living with a parent who lost Italian citizenship lost it too.

For roughly a century, the reading was straightforward. Article 7 governed the child who was already a dual citizen at birth. Article 12 governed the child who was only Italian and picked up the foreign citizenship derivatively, through the parent’s naturalization. Consulates, comuni, and courts processed cases on that basis for decades.

That changed in 2022, when courts in Rome began reading Article 12 as an override: any parental naturalization during minority broke the chain, regardless of where the child was born or what passport the child already held. The Cassazione picked up the reasoning in subsequent decisions, and on 3 October 2024 the Ministry of the Interior formalized it with Circolare no. 43347, instructing consulates and municipalities to reject administrative applications on those grounds.

The effect was brutal and retroactive in practice. Families who had spent years and thousands of dollars assembling documents were told their line was legally dead, in cases that would have been approved eighteen months earlier. Judicial outcomes split by tribunal. Some judges kept applying the traditional reading, others followed the new one, and applicants had no way to predict which they would draw.

In July 2025, the First Civil Section of the Cassation acknowledged the conflict was irreconcilable and referred it to the Sezioni Unite with interlocutory orders nos. 20122 and 20129 of 18 July 2025. The public hearing was held on 14 April 2026. The judgment landed on 26 July.

The case behind the ruling

The Sezioni Unite chose a case that puts the maternal line squarely at the center.

The ancestor was a woman born in the province of Belluno in 1923. She emigrated to Venezuela. Her son was born there in 1946, Italian by descent through her, Venezuelan by birth. She naturalized as a Venezuelan citizen in 1954, when he was eight.

The Tribunal of Rome had ruled against her descendants, reasoning in part that the son had never expressed any wish during his lifetime to recover the Italian citizenship he had supposedly lost through his mother’s naturalization. The descendants appealed to the Cassation. The Public Prosecutor’s office filed written submissions supporting the appeal, and the Substitute Prosecutor General argued for it at the hearing. The Ministry of the Interior appeared through the Avvocatura Generale dello Stato.

The Sezioni Unite ruled for the family.

The four principles of law

The Court set out four principi di diritto. These are the binding statements, and they are what your attorney will cite in a Rome tribunal filing next month.

1. The 2025 reform does not apply to court cases filed before 27 March 2025

Article 3-bis of Law 91/1992, introduced by Decree-Law 36/2025 and converted by Law 74/2025, does not apply, by the legislature’s own express provision, to judicial applications for a declaration of citizenship status filed before 27 March 2025. Those cases remain governed by the law as it stood before.

This matters more than it looks. It confirms that the reform has a hard procedural boundary, and that everyone who filed in court before the cutoff is litigating under the old rules.

2. Article 7 protects the dual citizen from birth

An unemancipated minor born abroad to an Italian citizen (father or mother) in a state where citizenship is acquired at birth by jus soli is a dual national by operation of law from birth, and keeps Italian citizenship even where the Italian parent naturalizes or otherwise loses citizenship. The only exceptions are a contrary provision in an international treaty, or a properly executed renunciation after the person reached majority or was emancipated.

Note what the Court did not require. No election, no formal declaration at 21, no proof that the ancestor “kept up” the citizenship. The status persists unless it was affirmatively given up.

3. Article 12 only ever reached the exclusively Italian minor

Only an unemancipated minor holding Italian citizenship and nothing else, residing with the parent, could be dragged along by that parent’s loss of citizenship, and only where the foreign law allowed the minor to acquire the foreign nationality derivatively rather than at birth.

This is the sentence that dismantles Circolare 43347/2024 as a matter of law.

4. Mothers and fathers are equal, for loss as well as transmission

The full equalization of mothers and fathers that followed Constitutional Court judgments no. 87/1975 and no. 30/1983 applies not only to transmission of citizenship at birth, but also to the consequences for the child of the parent’s loss of citizenship, where the child derived citizenship from that parent and shared residence with them.

If you work in this field, this fourth point deserves more attention than it has gotten. It closes a gap that the Ministry could otherwise have used to argue asymmetric treatment in maternal lines, and it is directly relevant to how 1948 cases interact with minor issue facts.

What this means, line by line

United States. A child born in the US to an Italian citizen was American at birth by the Fourteenth Amendment and Italian by descent. The parent’s naturalization during that child’s minority did not end the child’s Italian citizenship. The chain continues to you. This covers the single largest category of rejected files worldwide.

Brazil and the Grande Naturalização. Minors caught by Brazil’s collective naturalization did not lose Italian citizenship. The parent’s naturalization was involuntary to begin with, and children who were dual citizens from birth are independently protected under Article 7 as now interpreted. For Italo-Brazilian families, one of the largest applicant communities on earth, this closes two arguments at once.

Argentina and Venezuela. Same analysis. Both grant citizenship at birth on territory, so the child was a dual national from birth and Article 7 governs.

Canada and Australia. The analysis is the same for births during the periods when unrestricted jus soli applied. Canada’s rule changed in 1977 and Australia’s in 1986, so births after those dates need to be checked individually rather than assumed.

Any line where the naturalizing ancestor was the mother. Principle 4 applies directly.

What the ruling does not do

I would rather you hear this from me than discover it after paying a retainer.

It does not cancel Circolare 43347/2024. A Cassation judgment binds courts. It does not automatically repeal an administrative instruction. Until the Ministry of the Interior issues a new circolare superseding the October 2024 one, consulates and comuni can and probably will keep rejecting minor issue files at the counter. Nobody has announced a timeline for that circolare. The realistic expectation is that they will comply eventually, because a Sezioni Unite ruling is exactly the instrument designed to settle conflicting interpretations, but “eventually” is not a date.

It does not reopen the consular route for people the 2025 reform excluded. The judgment resolved a case filed before 27 March 2025, and the Court expressly decided it without reference to Article 3-bis, because Article 3-bis did not apply to that case.

It does not touch the generational limit. If Article 3-bis applies to you, it applies to you regardless of what happened in 1928 with your great-grandfather’s naturalization. Winning the minor issue argument does not get you past a rule that says you were never Italian in the first place.

Anyone marketing this ruling as a general reopening of jure sanguinis is selling you something.

Where the Tajani reform stands right now

Two decisions from the Constitutional Court frame everything that happens next, and they point in opposite directions.

On 30 April 2026, the Corte Costituzionale deposited sentenza n. 63/2026, rejecting the challenges the Tribunal of Turin had raised against Article 3-bis. Some questions were declared unfounded, others inadmissible. The Court characterized Article 3-bis not as a revocation of citizenship but as an original preclusion on acquisition, which is the reasoning that allowed it to survive the retroactivity attack. At the time, the Court also refused the parties’ request to send the matter to Luxembourg, holding that the EU case law they cited was not pertinent precisely because the provision does not strip anyone of citizenship they already had.

Then, on 23 July 2026, three days before the minor issue ruling, the same Court deposited ordinanza n. 147/2026 and referred the question to the Court of Justice of the European Union under Article 267 TFEU. The referral arose from proceedings raised by the Tribunals of Mantova and Campobasso, and asks whether Article 3-bis is compatible with Article 9 TEU and Article 20 TFEU, the provisions that establish and protect EU citizenship. The Court invoked the principle of sincere cooperation and the CJEU’s exclusive competence over the definitive interpretation of Union law, and suspended the joined constitutional proceedings pending the answer.

Read that sequence again. The text of Article 3-bis had not changed. The EU provisions had not changed. The relevant case law was already known in March. Four months later the Court went to Luxembourg anyway.

Two practical points. First, ordinanza 147/2026 suspends only the joined proceedings before the Constitutional Court. It is not a general stay of Law 74/2025 and it does not require every Italian judge to freeze pending cases. Second, the referral means the reform’s fate is now genuinely open in a way it was not in April.

So who benefits, and how much?

You filed a court case before 27 March 2025 and it was rejected or stalled on minor issue grounds. You are the primary beneficiary. Article 3-bis does not apply to your case, and the interpretation used against you has been overruled. Talk to your attorney about your specific procedural posture this week, not next quarter. What is available to you depends on whether your case is pending, on appeal, or already final.

You have a pending court case filed before the cutoff that has not yet been decided. Your judge is now bound by the Sezioni Unite principle. The single biggest obstacle in your file just disappeared.

You qualify under Article 3-bis (parent or grandparent born in Italy, or one of the other statutory conditions) and your line also has a minor issue problem. Good news twice over. Your generational eligibility survives the reform, and your minor issue defect is gone as a matter of law. Expect friction at the consulate until the new circolare issues, and budget for the possibility of a judicial filing.

You do not qualify under Article 3-bis and you did not file before 27 March 2025. The minor issue ruling does not fix your problem, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Your path runs through the CJEU referral, and the strategic question is whether to file now with an EU law argument built in from the start rather than waiting for Luxembourg. Filing early can put you in a stronger procedural position if the reform falls. It also costs money that you may lose if it does not.

You have not started, and you do not know which category you are in. That is the most common situation and the easiest to resolve. It takes a records review, not a guess.

What to do next

The ruling changes the law. It does not change the documents.

Whatever category you fall into, the same evidentiary spine applies: the Italian ancestor’s birth record from the comune, the naturalization record or the certified statement that none exists, and an unbroken chain of vital records connecting every generation to you. In minor issue cases the naturalization certificate matters more than usual, because the date it was granted against the child’s date of birth is the fact the whole argument turns on. In maternal lines, the mother’s records are now doing work they were not previously allowed to do.

One thing worth flagging: in judicial proceedings, the applicant proves descent through vital records. The burden of proving an interruption in the line sits with the Ministry of the Interior. That allocation is more favorable than most people assume, and it is another reason the judicial route currently outperforms the consular one.

If your file was closed on minor issue grounds any time after October 2024, pull it back out. The reason it was closed no longer holds.

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Frequently asked questions

What is the “minor issue” in Italian citizenship by descent?

The minor issue is the question of whether a child lost Italian citizenship when a parent naturalized as a foreign citizen while the child was still a minor. From 2022 onward, some Italian courts and then the Ministry of the Interior read Articles 7 and 12 of Law 555/1912 to say yes, treating the line of transmission as broken. Thousands of applications from descendants in the US, Brazil, Argentina, and other jus soli countries were rejected on that basis. On 26 July 2026 the Sezioni Unite of the Court of Cassation held that a child who was a dual citizen from birth kept Italian citizenship despite the parent’s naturalization.

What did Cassazione 24045/2026 decide?

Four things. The 2025 reform does not apply to court cases filed before 27 March 2025. A minor born abroad who was a dual citizen from birth kept Italian citizenship under Article 7 even if the Italian parent naturalized. Article 12 applied only to minors who held Italian citizenship exclusively. And mothers and fathers are treated identically, both for transmission and for the effects of a parent’s loss of citizenship.

My great-grandfather naturalized while my grandfather was a minor. Is my case viable now?

If your grandfather was born in a jus soli country and therefore held that country’s citizenship from birth, the Sezioni Unite answer is favorable on the minor issue point. He did not lose Italian citizenship, and the line to you stayed intact. Your overall eligibility still has to be assessed against the 2025 reform, the date of any filing, and the pending CJEU referral.

Does this mean the consulates will approve my application now?

Not automatically, and probably not soon. The judgment binds courts. Circolare 43347/2024 is an administrative instruction that remains in force until the Ministry of the Interior replaces it. Until then, expect consulates and comuni to keep applying the restrictive reading, which makes the judicial route the stronger option for minor issue files.

Does this ruling undo the Tajani decree?

No. The generational limits in Article 3-bis of Law 91/1992 are untouched. The Constitutional Court upheld the provision against domestic constitutional challenges in sentenza 63/2026, deposited 30 April 2026, and then referred its compatibility with EU law to the Court of Justice with ordinanza 147/2026 on 23 July 2026. Those are separate questions from the minor issue.

I am affected by Brazil’s Grande Naturalização. Does this help me?

Yes. Children of Italian citizens caught by the collective naturalization did not lose Italian citizenship. The parent’s naturalization was not voluntary, and independently, a child who was a dual citizen from birth is protected under Article 7 as the Sezioni Unite interpreted it.

What if my Italian ancestor was a woman?

The fourth principle addresses this directly. The equality established by Constitutional Court judgments 87/1975 and 30/1983 applies to the consequences of a parent’s loss of citizenship, not only to transmission. The case the Sezioni Unite decided involved an Italian-born mother who naturalized in Venezuela, so this is not dictum.

My application was already denied. Can I do anything?

It depends on where the file stands. A denied administrative application and a case that reached a final judgment are different situations with different remedies, and a pending case is different again. That is a records-and-docket question rather than a legal-theory question, and it is worth resolving before any deadline runs.

Should I wait for the CJEU ruling before filing?

If Article 3-bis blocks you, that is the real strategic question, and the answer is not obvious. Filing now with the EU law argument built in puts you in the queue if the reform falls. Waiting preserves your money if it does not. Cases already pending will benefit from a favorable CJEU decision the same way new filings do.

Is the minor issue completely settled now?

As a matter of interpretation, yes. The Sezioni Unite exist precisely to resolve conflicts between panels, and judgment 24045/2026 was confirmed by companion judgment 24184/2026 from the same hearing. What remains unsettled is the administrative response and the fate of the 2025 reform.

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Get your line assessed

If any part of your family tree involves an ancestor who naturalized while the next person in your line was still a minor, the legal ground under your case moved on 26 July. Whether that helps you depends on facts that are specific to your file: birth country, naturalization date, filing date, and which generation your Italian-born ancestor occupies.

We review the records and tell you which category you are actually in, including when the answer is that you do not have a case. Book a free consultation and bring whatever documents you have, even if the collection is incomplete.

[Schedule a free consultation →]

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Sources

• Corte di Cassazione, Sezioni Unite Civili, sentenza n. 24045 of 26 July 2026 (hearing 14 April 2026)
• Corte di Cassazione, Sezioni Unite Civili, sentenza n. 24184/2026
• Corte di Cassazione, Prima Sezione Civile, ordinanze interlocutorie nn. 20122 and 20129 of 18 July 2025
• Corte Costituzionale, sentenza n. 63/2026, deposited 30 April 2026
• Corte Costituzionale, ordinanza n. 147/2026, deposited 23 July 2026
• Legge 13 giugno 1912, n. 555, artt. 7 and 12
• Decreto-legge 28 marzo 2025, n. 36, converted with modifications by legge 23 maggio 2025, n. 74
• Ministero dell’Interno, Circolare n. 43347 of 3 October 2024
• Corte Costituzionale, sentenze nn. 87/1975 and 30/1983