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If you’ve been following the process of claiming Italian citizenship by descent, also known as jure sanguinis, or citizenship recognition through bloodline, you already know that 2025 changed the game. The Tajani Decree (Decree-Law 36/2025, later converted into Law 74/2025) came into force on March 27, 2025, and dramatically tightened the rules for people born abroad who are several generations removed from their Italian ancestor and who already hold another citizenship.

Now, two recent decisions from the Ordinary Court of Bologna are giving applicants their first real look at how judges are applying that reform in practice, and the results are cautiously encouraging for some, though far from a blanket guarantee for everyone.

The Rulings in Brief

In April and May of 2026, the Bologna court issued two separate rulings (no. 3335/2026, decided April 17, and no. 4038/2026, decided May 13) recognizing Italian citizenship by descent for US citizens whose family lines extended beyond the second generation. Both cases were brought by the Milan-based Aprigliano International Law Firm, a practice known for handling citizenship cases through judicial appeals.

What makes these rulings notable isn’t the family history involved, it’s the timing of the lawsuits. In fact, both were filed after the March 27, 2025 cutoff that has since become the central battleground in nearly every post-reform citizenship case.

From paperwork to timing: how the legal test has changed

Before the reform, an iure sanguinis case was largely a documentation exercise. Specifically, applicants needed to prove an unbroken chain of citizenship from their Italian ancestor down to themselves, birth certificates, marriage records, proof the ancestor never naturalized elsewhere before the next generation was born, translations, apostilles. As long as the paper trail held up, recognition followed.

However, that’s no longer the whole story.Nowadays, Courts are now also asking a second question: what was the applicant actually doing before the law changed? Simply having Italian ancestry and later showing up in court isn’t enough on its own. Judges want to see evidence that the applicant had already set the process in motion before March 27, 2025.

For example, in the Bologna cases, the court found that the plaintiffs had documented exactly that kind of early action, including:

• Correspondence with Italian consulates before the deadline
• Certified emails (PEC) sent to consular offices
• Attempts to secure appointments through the consular booking system
• A signed legal mandate dating back to April 2024
• Other records showing a clear, unambiguous intent to pursue recognition

Ultimately, the distinction the court drew is a subtle but important one: there’s a real difference between someone who simply intended to apply “eventually” and someone who can show they had already begun, engaging a lawyer, contacting a consulate, generating dated proof of their efforts. Former is a private intention that’s nearly impossible to verify in court. The latter is documented conduct.

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Not a Precedent, yet

It’s worth being clear-eyed about what these rulings do and don’t do. They’re first-instance decisions, which means they can be appealed and don’t bind other courts. Moreover, a different judge presented with a similar fact pattern could reach a different conclusion entirely. Case law interpreting the Tajani Decree is still being built, one ruling at a time, and small differences in the evidence presented can tip the outcome.

The ‘Prenot@mi’ problem

Meanwhile, one of the thorniest issues in this whole area involves Prenot@mi, the online platform many consulates use to schedule citizenship appointments. The reformed law gives weight to appointments that were actually booked through official channels, but plenty of applicants simply couldn’t get one. Calendars were full, sometimes for months or years, effectively locking people out of the system through no fault of their own.

Naturally, that raises an obvious fairness question: should the government be able to penalize someone for not booking an appointment when the booking system itself was the obstacle? The Bologna court didn’t issue a sweeping answer here. It stopped short of saying every failed booking attempt counts as a formal application. But it did leave room for judges to weigh the full picture, meaning an applicant without a confirmed appointment might still succeed if other evidence shows they were clearly trying to act before the deadline.

Why strategy now matters as much as documents

The practical takeaway is that filing a folder of civil records and expecting a judge to mechanically apply the old Italian citizenship by descent framework is no longer a winning approach. A modern case needs to be built deliberately: laying out the applicant’s conduct before March 27, 2025, connecting that conduct to the current legal framework, and raising constitutional or EU law arguments where appropriate. In a legal landscape this technical, how a case is presented can matter almost as much as the underlying facts.

 

 

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The Constitutional Court wrinkle

These Bologna decisions also have to be read alongside Constitutional Court ruling no. 63/2026, issued on April 30, 2026. According to the Aprigliano firm’s interpretation of that decision (worth noting: this is the firm’s reading, not an uncontested legal fact), the Constitutional Court moved away from treating citizenship by descent as an automatic, permanent status acquired at birth. Instead, the ruling suggests it can be limited if an applicant hadn’t crossed a certain procedural threshold before the reform took effect. In other words, the conversation has shifted from purely genealogical questions to questions about how the change in law affects people who were already partway through the process.

The European angle

There’s also a broader EU dimension that could matter even for people who took no action before March 27, 2025. Italian citizenship isn’t just a national status. It comes bundled with EU citizenship, and that connection opens the door to EU law arguments against the new restrictions. A judge who finds those arguments persuasive has two options: disapply the Tajani Decree directly and apply the pre-reform rules, or refer the question to the Court of Justice of the European Union for a preliminary ruling. Where Italian law conflicts with EU law, EU law wins.

 

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The bottom line

For applicants pursuing Italian citizenship by descent who took concrete steps before March 27, 2025, solid documentation of that early action can be decisive. For those who hadn’t yet started the process, these rulings don’t shut the door completely, but they signal that a different legal strategy, likely centered on EU law, currently offers the most promising path forward.

Either way, the question has changed. It’s no longer just “do I have an Italian ancestor?” It’s “which legal path is actually available to me, with what evidence, in front of which court, and with what level of risk?”

These Bologna rulings are good news for the plaintiffs involved, but they’re not a template anyone can simply copy, and they don’t represent a settled shift in the law. What they do show is that in the post-Tajani landscape, how a case is built and argued may matter just as much as the family history behind it.

Request a case review

If you are unsure whether the Bologna rulings or any other post-Tajani path applies to your situation, a case-specific review is the necessary first step.