Rome — two American families went from Italy The Supreme Court on Tuesday challenged the scope of a year-old law passed by Giorgia Meloni’s government that limited citizenship claims to Italian descendants more than two generations removed.
His lawyer, Marco Malone, argued before the Court of Cassation that the law should only apply to people born after it took effect, potentially opening a path to citizenship for millions of people living in the United States and parts of Latin America.
A decision by an expanded panel is expected in the coming weeks, making the decision binding in lower courts.
A decree from the far-right-led government in March 2025 put the brakes on previous rules, allowing anyone who can prove ancestry dating back to Italy’s formation in 1861 to seek citizenship. Italy’s constitutional court ruled last month that the new law is legal, but Malone said the Supreme Court has the power to clarify the scope of the law.
“The families involved in this case are simply descendants of an Italian ancestor … who immigrated to the United States like millions of others in the late 19th century,” Malone said before the hearing.
Malone’s case will clarify the citizenship rights of descendants of approximately 14 million Italians who immigrated between and after 1877 and 1914, according to State Department data.
While Malone’s case involved two families, dozens of other people whose citizenship claims were barred by law were present outside the courthouse in solidarity.
Karen Bonadio said she hopes to one day move to Italy on the strength of her lineage. She brought photographs of herself as a young girl, along with her birth certificate, along with her Italian-born great-grandparents who came to upstate New York from Basilicata in southern Italy.
“The new law says, ‘All these great-grandchildren did not know their great-grandfathers.’ Showing the photo, she said, “This was in 1963, I think I was three and a half years old.”
At least one of Malone’s cases was dismissed in lower courts before the new law, partly relying on rulings that Italian immigrants who took a second citizenship before having children could not take Italian citizenship.
Jennifer Daly’s case has been working its way through the Italian bureaucracy for nearly a decade. His grandfather, Giuseppe Delfolo, immigrated to the United States from the northern province of Trento in 1912, when it was under Austro-Hungarian control. He later married an Italian woman and brought her with him, and at some point became a naturalized American citizen.
Daly said he always had a strong Italian identity that went beyond his last name anglicized by U.S. immigration officials. She petitioned for citizenship because “it’s really an identity of who I am, where I’m from. It’s more than citizenship. It’s everything,” Daly, a retired history professor, said by phone from Salina, Kansas.
Outside the courthouse, Alexis Traino said both of her maternal grandparents came from Italy, where she now lives, primarily in Florence.
“My whole life, I grew up knowing — and my parents always emphasized this — that I was Italian. I had a very, very strong connection to Italy,” said Traino, 34, who was waiting for documents from Italy and the U.S. when the law passed, blocking her case.
“I want to be Italian,” she said. I want to contribute to Italy and be a citizen.”
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Barry reported from Milan.
