The Prenot@mi appointment crisis: What to do when Consulates are completely blocked

Securing a citizenship appointment through the Prenot@mi portal at Italian consulates in New York, London, Toronto, or Melbourne has become almost impossible. With waiting lists extending three to five years—and appointment slots filling in seconds—thousands of applicants find their path to Italian citizenship (jure sanguinis) completely stalled by administrative delays.

However, Italian law states that administrative citizenship applications must be processed within 730 days (2 years).
In this fifth episode, Avv. Salvatore Aprigliano explains the legal strategy known as the “Against the Queue” Lawsuit. Learn how applicants facing unreasonable consular wait times can bypass consular backlogs entirely and petition an Italian tribunal directly to have their citizenship recognized by a judge.

What You Will Learn in This Episode

● The 730-Day Statutory Mandate: The legal timeframe Italian law sets for administrative processing (D.P.R. 362/1994).
● The “Against the Queue” Strategy: How lack of appointment availability constitutes a denial of justice (contro la coda), unlocking judicial jurisdiction.
● Documenting Consular Failure: How to collect admissible court evidence—including Prenot@mi error screens, booking attempt logs, and unanswered email records.
● Consulate vs. Judicial Venue: Why filing in an Italian tribunal is faster, safer, and bypasses consular backlogs entirely.
● How Court Litigation Works: Why you don’t need to travel to Italy, how power of attorney works, and what to expect during trial.

00:02 – 00:35

Let’s talk about a late-night ritual that thousands of people seeking citizenship by descent go through. It’s 11:59 p.m. Rome time. Once again, you open up your computer. You’re sitting in front of the computer screen, logged into the Prenot@mi portal, waiting to try and snag a consular appointment. Your hands are sweaty. Midnight strikes. Rome time. You click. The screen freezes. Five seconds that feel like an eternity. And then the result. Once again, that red text pops up: “There are no appointments available. Please try again later.”

01:07 – 02:13

To solve a problem, first you have to diagnose it. Why have consular wait times gotten so long? It all stems from a legal premise that might sound reasonable on paper. Once your paperwork is ready, you submit your Italian citizenship recognition application to the consulate, and the consulate has to approve or deny it within 730 days. Not one week, not two weeks: 730 days. Over 100 weeks, two full years.

And yet this massive window still isn’t enough. For years, especially in countries with large Italian descendant communities like Argentina, Brazil, and other South American nations, people have waited far more than two years, in some cases five years or longer. So many applicants began turning to Italian courts, arguing that the consulates were taking longer than legally allowed. And they were right. The courts started acknowledging the obvious: the system was overwhelmed.

02:21 – 03:38

The real issue is no mystery. Interest in dual citizenship exploded. Millions of descendants around the world discovered the value of an Italian passport, the value of European citizenship, and the chance to reconnect with their family roots. Consulates, however, didn’t scale at the same pace.

The logical solution would have been simple: hire more staff, boost capacity, process more applications. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the system pushed the bottleneck one step back. Before, the question was, “How long will the consulate take to process my case?” Then the question became, “Can I even get an appointment to submit my application within a reasonable time frame?”

That’s when the nightmare began. People started spending weeks, months, even years trying to book a slot on the consular portal. They’d refresh the page, wake up in the middle of the night, clicking over and over, hoping an open slot would pop up. For many, landing a citizenship appointment stopped feeling like an administrative step and turned into a literal lottery.

03:46 – 04:15

And many didn’t even bother trying because they already knew getting into the system was nearly impossible. Then, in January 2025, the fee went up. The consular fee to file a jure sanguinis citizenship application jumped to €600 for every adult applicant.

The justification was simple: there are too many applications and the administration lacks the resources to handle them. A lot of people thought, “Okay, if it costs more, maybe the system will finally speed up.” But that’s not what happened.

04:20 – 05:40

The fee went up, sure, but the wait times stayed exactly the same. In 2025, Italy introduced new citizenship restrictions and many descendants could no longer apply. In theory, fewer eligible applicants should have meant shorter waitlists and a faster system. Did it work out that way? Not quite. The waitlists stayed the same. Appointments stayed scarce, and the booking portal remained the same old roadblock.

And then, in early 2026, Italy passed a new law, Law No. 11 of 2026. Under this new system, consulates are legally capped at processing a limited number of citizenships each year. The booking system stayed unchanged. If you don’t get an appointment, you just have to try again. Just like playing the lottery.

And even if you win that lottery and finally get to apply, the deadline for a decision is no longer 730 days. It’s no longer two years. It’s been stretched to 36 months, three full years.

05:47 – 06:50

And starting January 1st, 2029, the system changes again. Citizenship applications for adults living abroad will no longer be handled by local consulates. You won’t be able to just walk into your consulate and hand over the precious documents you spent years tracking down.

A single central office has been set up in Rome. And to apply, you’ll have to put your precious documents in an envelope and mail them to Rome. You heard that right. You’ll have to mail your application and all your paper documents to Rome.

One central office in Rome tasked with handling applications from every corner of the globe. Thousands upon thousands of citizenship files, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, translations, apostilles shipped from all over the world in hard copy to a single office. The system was already underwater when consulates were handling the filings.

06:58 – 07:24

Instead of streamlining access, they raised prices and made it more expensive. They set up a centralized system where you no longer have any direct contact or communication with the consulate.

That’s why, for many descendants, the consular route has become, even more than before, an absolute obstacle course. It feels more and more like a door slowly shutting for good.

07:38 – 08:42

Now, this is where my perspective as an Italian lawyer can completely change the way you look at the issue. Italian bureaucracy can make you feel trapped. It can give you the impression that you have no other choice but to wait, endlessly refresh a web page, and hope that an appointment magically pops up one day.

But the law says something different. The key point is this: under Italian law, there is no statute requiring you to first submit your citizenship application to the consulate, wait for years, and only then go to court. There is no legal obligation to wait for a formal denial from the consulate before you can turn to an Italian judge to obtain recognition of your citizenship.

Because Italian citizenship by descent doesn’t stem from the consulate. The consulate doesn’t grant Italian citizenship. It merely recognizes a legal status that, provided you meet the legal requirements, already exists at birth and simply needs to be established.

08:47 – 09:48

So if the administrative route becomes impossible, unreasonable, or blocked, the court can intervene. And that is exactly what has happened in recent years. Many applicants were ready. They had their documents. They had reconstructed their family lineage. They had the legal basis to obtain recognition.

But they couldn’t submit their application because the consular appointment system was saturated. It simply wasn’t working. No appointments, zero availability. Sometimes, after years of trying, people would finally manage to get an appointment only to have it scheduled two, three, or four years out.

These are completely unreasonable wait times, even longer than the legal time frames allowed to complete the entire administrative procedure. At that point, the issue is no longer just a practical inconvenience. It effectively becomes a denial of a right—the right to obtain recognition of Italian citizenship.

09:54 – 10:47

Italian courts have already recognized this principle in numerous rulings. If an applicant can prove that it’s practically impossible to get a consulate appointment within a reasonable time frame, or that the appointment system creates delays exceeding those established for the entire procedure, then in that case you can take your case straight to an Italian court.

In our practice, we call these ATQ cases: citizenship court cases based on excessive consular wait times.

Technically, ATQ isn’t an independent legal category defined by statute. It’s a standard lawsuit to establish jure sanguinis citizenship that, instead of being filed with the consulate, is filed in court specifically because you can’t get an appointment at the consulate and the wait times drag on unreasonably.

10:57 – 11:41

In plain English, we tell the judge, “My client isn’t trying to bypass the rules. They aren’t looking for shortcuts. They’re solely trying to exercise a right, a right that the administrative system isn’t allowing them to exercise.”

We aren’t willing to wait forever. We collect evidence, screenshots of the booking portal proving the ongoing lack of appointments. We write to the consulate. We formally request appointments from the consulate. But when all these attempts fail, at that point we decide to go straight to the Italian court and ask the court to directly recognize Italian citizenship, because when the administrative door is shut, the judicial door remains open.

11:56 – 12:48

How does a consular delay case actually work in practice? Imagine you finally decided to go for it. You’ve mapped out your family tree, tracked down your Italian ancestor, figured out what town they came from, and started gathering the certificates, getting them apostilled and translated.

In an ideal world, you’d bring everything to the consulate and just wait for a decision. But, as we’ve seen, often that ideal world no longer exists. So the first step is building the legal file.

We gather the essential documents to prove your direct line of descent from your Italian ancestor down to you. The goal isn’t just to pack a box with every possible piece of paper. The goal is to clearly prove to the judge that citizenship was passed down along the family line, generation after generation, without interruption. And this is where the court process can be very different from the consular route.

12:57 – 14:00

At the consulate, they often demand an enormous file: birth, marriage, and death certificates, translations, apostilles, rectifications, document corrections, sometimes even documents that don’t fundamentally change the story of your lineage.

In court, however, the thinking is completely different. The judge looks at the substance. They want to know if that person really is your ancestor. They want to know if that line of descent is proven. They want to know if Italian citizenship was passed down to you.

This means that, in many cases, you don’t need all the documents required by the consulate.

14:05 – 15:32

Certain marriage or death certificates might be irrelevant if they aren’t needed to prove the transmission of citizenship. And even minor discrepancies in names, dates, or places of birth can simply be explained in the petition. You don’t necessarily have to correct every single document before getting started.

For a family, this can make a massive difference: fewer useless documents, fewer upfront rectifications, lower costs, fewer months wasted chasing formal amendments and hunting down paperwork.

And there’s another real advantage. With the consulate, every adult applicant usually has to submit their own separate file with their own original documents. This gets tricky when siblings, cousins, or relatives from the same family live in different states under different consulates.

Everyone risks having to rebuild the exact same file, duplicate the same certificates, pay for the same translations, and get the same apostilles. In court, on the other hand, when multiple descendants share the same Italian ancestor and the same genealogical line, you can file together in a single lawsuit with just one set of original documents for everyone.

In other words, the family can stand united before the judge instead of being split up across different consulates, different portals, and different impossible-to-book appointments. Of course, every case needs to be evaluated carefully. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but often the judicial route isn’t just faster; it’s also much more practical.

15:38 – 16:14

Then comes the second major piece of the file: proof of the consular blockage. Here we need to show the judge something very simple. You tried to go through the administrative route, but that door was closed.

That’s precisely why we gather evidence of booking attempts, portal screenshots, “no appointments available” messages, dates and times of your attempts, and any communications with the consulate.

In a family petition, specific documentation must be collected for each consulate involved. Once we have the complete genealogical file and proof of the delay for each consulate, we file the petition with the competent Italian civil court.

16:22 – 17:21

And here’s the good news. You don’t need to speak Italian. You don’t need to get a visa to come to Italy. And you don’t have to appear in court. It’s an entirely document-based proceeding.

Witnesses aren’t allowed. Your presence isn’t allowed. Through a special power of attorney, our legal team represents you before the Italian judge. We present your family line. We submit the documents. We explain to the judge why you couldn’t access the consulate. And we ask the court to recognize your status as an Italian citizen along with any family members who filed jointly with you.

Because the judge isn’t deciding whether the Prenot@mi portal is user-friendly or not. They’re deciding whether you have the right to Italian citizenship, whether your lineage is proven, and whether the administrative route has truly become impossible in your specific case—whether the wait times are unreasonable or getting an appointment was simply impossible. Just like we demonstrated in this ruling.

17:29 – 18:01

In this case, our client tried consecutively for 24 months to get an appointment at the consulate. We have screenshots showing 12:01 am Rome time on different days, across different weeks, across different months of the year.

In the end, exhausted, he reached out to us. He had gathered all the documents, gotten them amended, translated, apostilled, and still couldn’t get an appointment.

18:07 – 18:50

When he called me, he said, “Counsel, I’m 75 years old. My dream is to retire to Italy and spend the final years of my life in the place where my family came from. That’s my dream. I’m afraid I won’t get to see it happen before I die. Please help me.”

We went to court, presented those circumstances, and within 12 months his Italian citizenship was recognized. Today that man is living in Italy. He fulfilled a lifelong dream, reconnecting with his Italian roots.

And when that happens, it brings me so much joy, and it gives me yet another reason to do what I do.

19:04 – 19:39

The Prenot@mi portal wants you to believe that getting access to your roots is a matter of luck, but Italian law guarantees that it’s a matter of right.

You don’t have to be the victim of an inefficient bureaucracy. If you’ve been trying to get an appointment for months, or you’re looking at your local consulate’s waitlists and realizing you’ll have to wait five or six years of your life, it’s time to change strategy.

Contact Aprigliano Law Firm. We’ll evaluate your timeline, review your paperwork, and see if your case qualifies for a direct judicial route to bypass the consular backlog. You’ll find all our contact info right below in the description.

19:47 – 20:34

Now, before you decide to apply for an Italian passport, whether through the consulate or through the courts, there’s one crucial thing you need to understand. Dual citizenship isn’t just about getting a nice burgundy passport so you can skip the lines at European airports. It’s a legal status that changes your relationship with two different nations.

In the next episode, we’ll break down the practical realities of dual citizenship. We’ll look at the everyday changes, the hidden tax implications, and the legal obligations you should be aware of and understand before starting this process.

Subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss the next episode. I’m Salvatore Aprigliano, your expert in jure sanguinis citizenship. Ciao.