The Court of Caltanissetta, in Sicily, dismissed the requirement of "exclusively Italian citizenship" in a lawsuit filed between the entry into force of Decree-Law 36/2025, known as the Tajani Decree, and its conversion into Law 74/2025.
The ruling, issued on June 10, 2026 and now final, recognized the Italian citizenship of a British woman who filed the lawsuit on May 2, 2025.
At that time, the Tajani Decree had already altered the rules for citizenship by descent, but it still allowed recognition when one of the Italian parents or grandparents had been born in Italy. This was the case for the applicant, whose grandfather was born on Italian territory.
The problem arose weeks later.
The Supreme Court reaffirmed: citizenship is born with the person.
- New legal front opened
- Processes can still be filed.
- Individual assessment before any decision.
On May 24, 2025, Law 74 came into effect, which converted the decree with relevant changes. Parliament replaced the criterion of birth in Italy with the requirement that the father or grandfather was, or had been at the time of death, a relative. exclusively Italian citizens.
The change would directly affect the case, since the applicant's grandfather also held British citizenship.
New rule only applies after conversion, court says.
Judge Marcello Testaquatra understood that the case should be analyzed according to the normative text in force when the action was filed.
"It is to this normative text, therefore, that reference must be made for the decision in this case," he stated in the ruling.
The court cited case law from the Court of Cassation according to which changes made during the conversion of a decree-law, when "entirely or substantially substitutive," produce effects from the entry into force of the conversion law, and not from the issuance of the decree.
Therefore, the requirement of exclusively Italian citizenship, introduced later by Law 74, was not applied to the lawsuit filed on May 2nd.
The judge considered that the condition stipulated by Decree-Law 36/2025 had been fulfilled and recognized the applicant's citizenship.
“The condition […] in its formulation in force between March 28, 2025 and May 23, 2025, must be considered fully fulfilled, with the consequent right of the applicant to recognition of Italian citizenship,” the decision states.
Mellone had already raised the issue.
A few days after the approval of Law 74, lawyer Marco Mellone, defense attorney in the Caltanissetta case, published on Il Sole 24 Ore an analysis of the effects of the changes in the requests submitted precisely during that period.
"The new and different conditions imposed by the conversion law were unpredictable and unknown and, therefore, unenforceable at the time the application was submitted," he wrote.
The argument put forward by the lawyer goes beyond the solution adopted in Caltanissetta. Mellone maintained that there could even be grounds for applying the legislation that existed before the Tajani Decree itself to requests made before May 24th.
In this specific case, the court followed a more restrictive approach: it applied Decree-Law 36/2025 exactly as it was in effect on the date the lawsuit was filed.
According to Mellone, this is the first decision he is aware of to establish this time limit after the reform.
The Constitutional Court's decision changed the landscape. The new citizenship law will now be reviewed by the European Union's courts of justice.
The ruling does not bind other courts nor does it automatically guarantee recognition of citizenship in similar cases. However, the precedent gains relevance for those who filed judicial or administrative requests during the short window between the Tajani Decree and the entry into force of Law 74, especially when they met a condition stipulated in the decree that was subsequently eliminated or replaced by Parliament.
"We are talking about 'real lives' and not 'virtual' situations," Mellone stated.
