On Sunday evening, Gustavo Monasterios went to bed as a citizen of Venezuela. By Monday morning, he had learned that he was also Italian.

Monasterios, 47, found himself at the center of a legal upheaval that shook Italy last week.

After almost two years of mounting limits on citizenship by descent, during which government decisions closed the route to an Italian passport for large parts of the diaspora, Italy’s highest court struck down one major restriction following a lawsuit filed by Monasterios.

The rule known as the “minor issue,” which had destroyed the citizenship hopes of hundreds of thousands of Italian descendants, especially in the Americas, was eliminated.

Monasterios had lost his original citizenship case in 2021 and a subsequent appeal in 2023. As a final attempt, his lawyer, Monica Restanio, took the dispute to the Corte di Cassazione, Italy’s supreme court.

Despite the difficult odds, Restanio’s challenge to the minor issue succeeded. The Sezioni Unite, the Cassazione’s highest judicial panel, accepted her reasoning and reversed earlier decisions, including a 2024 ruling by a lower chamber of the same court that had supported the restriction.

Italian diaspora scores a major citizenship victory

The minor issue had a particularly severe effect on communities in the Americas because many countries there follow “ius soli,” automatically granting citizenship to people born on their soil. Children born to Italians in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Monasterios’ native Venezuela were considered to have lost Italian citizenship when their parents became naturalized citizens of those countries.

A small number of judges began using this interpretation in 2019. A lower section of the supreme court endorsed it in 2023, prompting regional courts responsible for citizenship cases to apply it widely. A government circular sent to consulates in October 2024 appeared to make the rule definitive.

Those decisions ended the ambitions of thousands of Italian descendants, disrupting long-term plans and separating members of the same families.

Monasterios was among those affected.

His grandmother, Rina Laveder, left the mountainous Dolomites in the Veneto region for Venezuela when she was a child. She later married a Venezuelan man and became a naturalized citizen in 1956.

Monasterios’ father, also named Gustavo and included in the lawsuit, was born in 1944 while Rina remained an Italian citizen. His uncle Pedro was born two years later.

Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, who introduced the 2025 reforms, has dismissively referred to some members of the diaspora as “fake Italians.” Monasterios, however, says he was born in 1979 into a family that deeply identified with Italy. “We grew up hearing the language, and my grandmother often read letters to us and showed us postcards sent from Italy,” he says.

“She never let go of her Italian identity. It was almost as though she still lived there. Being Italian was the central value she handed down to us. In Venezuela, Italian heritage is part of your DNA.”

After Rina died, the family traveled to Italy in 2001 to meet relatives. In 2005, Monasterios completed a master’s degree in Milan “to feel closer to Italy and better understand the place my grandmother had come from,” he says. Other relatives followed similar paths. His sister married an Italian, and in 2016 his cousins successfully obtained Italian citizenship.

For descendants of Italian women, the path to citizenship has generally been much harder than for those descended through men. Before 1948, women could not transmit citizenship to their children. As a result, Gustavo and Pedro Monasterios were considered Venezuelan at birth even though their mother was Italian. “It is straightforward discrimination against women,” Monasterios says.

In 2009, the supreme court retroactively overturned that gender-based discrimination. Applicants able to finance a lawsuit against the Italian state over the unequal treatment of female ancestors often succeed, but the legal process can be expensive and slow.

Encouraged by his cousins’ success, Monasterios filed a case in 2018 alongside his parents and brother. By the time the matter reached court in 2021, however, the minor issue had emerged. Their application was denied even though they were first- and second-generation descendants, and despite Pedro Monasterios and his children having been recognized as citizens only a few years earlier. Members of the same family, descended from the same woman, had received conflicting decisions.

“I had every element of an Italian identity, but I was still missing the final legal recognition,” says Monasterios, who already lives in Europe and works as a project officer for a large international organization.

“Seeing a family divided by a technical rule, despite sharing the same ancestry and history, was extremely hard to accept.

“This is about equal treatment. The same rights should apply to everyone.”

‘The family has been permanently divided’

The Monasterios family was far from alone. Joseph Spinelle, an Italian American, has lived apart from his relatives for two years after the policy change prevented them from obtaining citizenship through the same route he had used.

His wider family, including his mother, brother, aunt, sister and nieces, had intended to secure citizenship and relocate to Italy, the country their great-grandparents had left.

Because they lived in different parts of the United States, however, obtaining consular appointments proved extremely difficult. Waiting lists at some Italian consulates can stretch for years.

Spinelle, 54, and his wife Alisa were living in Arkansas and found it “practically impossible” to arrange an appointment at their closest consulate in Houston. They also knew descendants could relocate to Italy and complete the recognition process there.

“My wife asked, ‘What if we simply move to Italy?’ We decided we would turn our lives upside down and do it.”

After trying for five years to obtain a consular appointment, they moved to Italy in early 2024. By June, Spinelle had been recognized as an Italian citizen, with the status applying retroactively from birth. After selling everything they owned in Arkansas, the couple bought a home in Lecce, in the southern region of Puglia, and waited for the rest of the family to join them.

Four months later, the minor issue blocked his relatives’ applications. His sister had secured a consular appointment to register her citizenship, but because there was no transition period, the booking became useless. The family’s plan to settle together in Italy collapsed. Even Spinelle’s mother, whose grandparents had emigrated from Italy, was excluded. In an absurd contradiction, she had been treated as an unregistered Italian citizen during her son’s application but was later deemed never to have been Italian at all.

Before the Cassazione issued its decision, Spinelle was trying to accept that the separation from his family might be permanent.

His mother and brother had been preparing to buy a property in Abruzzo so they could live closer to him, while his niece hoped to apply to study in Italy.

Instead, after being blocked by the rule, his mother and brother relocated to South Carolina.

“Rather than living one region away, where I could take a train and visit regularly, seeing them now costs around $10,000,” he said. “It is awful. My mother is 80, so repeatedly asking her to relocate is not realistic.

“As she grows older, what am I supposed to do? The family has been divided indefinitely, and the human consequences are enormous. It makes me deeply sad, even though I am among the fortunate ones.

“I cannot move back. I used the last of my savings to buy this house. It was more than a property purchase; it was a declaration that I intended to remain here for the rest of my life. Emotionally, I do not know how to process the possibility of never living near my family again.”

After the minor issue was overturned, Spinelle celebrated, but uncertainty remains over whether his relatives can join him. Legislation introduced in March 2025 imposed a two-generation ceiling, excluding his siblings. A further restriction in May 2025 required the Italian ancestor to have died holding only Italian citizenship, effectively penalizing dual nationality within the diaspora.

“At present they are still excluded, but if that law is reversed, I believe they would probably come here. My mother still dreams of having a small, pleasant home in Abruzzo,” he said.

‘We have no intention of surrendering’

Cheryl Ossola is another Italian American whose status remains unresolved. All four of her grandparents were born and raised in Italy. In 2018, the former magazine editor, then aged 62, moved to Perugia in the central region of Umbria on a temporary visa while also filing a citizenship lawsuit.

“I expected to remain on a visa for a year and then be recognized as a citizen, but that is not what happened,” she says from Perugia, where she is still officially registered as an American visa holder.

Her maternal grandmother emigrated from Campania in southern Italy as a child and later married a man from Lazio in Syracuse, New York. She naturalized when Ossola’s mother was 19, still below the legal age of adulthood in the United States at that time. The minor issue therefore applied, meaning Ossola’s deceased mother was retrospectively considered to have lost Italian citizenship. Her case was heard in 2019. “The judge rejected us because of the minor issue, which had never existed as an obstacle until judges suddenly made it one,” she says.

As an Italian resident, Ossola had another possible path to a passport. People with Italian grandparents can qualify for a shortened two-year naturalization procedure, and she could have begun that process in 2020.

She refused, however, because she did not want to become Italian through naturalization. She wanted recognition of what she considered her inherited right. She also hoped to transmit citizenship to her two children, who planned to move to Italy later.

So she continued the legal fight.

“I have always felt a powerful connection to my Italian background, which is why I live here,” she says. “As a child, I used to say, ‘One day I will live in Italy.’ I could remain on a long-term visa, but I want to vote locally and participate fully in society. For me, citizenship through iure sanguinis, or descent, is genuine recognition of my family line. I possess that connection and want it formally acknowledged. We will not stop fighting because it matters too much.”

Ossola, now 70, challenged the 2019 rejection but lost her long-delayed appeal in 2024. Through her lawyer, Marco Mellone, who also argued against the minor issue at the successful April hearing and is among those challenging the newer restrictions, she appealed to the Cassazione. Her hearing had been set for October 2026 but has since been suspended. Ossola expects the Sezioni Unite ruling to send her case back to the Rome appeal court. With the minor issue removed, she believes she and her children should now have a strong claim to citizenship.

“Most of our families left Italy because circumstances forced them to,” she says. “They endured difficult journeys back and forth to maintain family ties. Citizenship recognizes what our ancestors sacrificed to create better futures for us.”

‘It is a vital part of our identity’

While people such as Ossola wait for their cases to move forward, others are closely watching the legal developments.

Mitchell Bowden, a 36-year-old Australian, has long wanted citizenship as a way of honoring his grandmother.

His nonna, Marisa Carpenetti, was born in 1938 in Istria, a territory now within Croatia but then under Italian control. After World War II, the area became part of Yugoslavia. “Like thousands of other Italians from Istria, she and her parents walked back toward Italy, only to be told they were not wanted,” Bowden says. “They were effectively refugees.”

After Marisa’s father died while the family was staying in temporary accommodation in Trieste, which had become Italy’s new border city, she was placed in an orphanage so her mother could work.

The family eventually emigrated to Australia. “They went in search of the Australian dream, a more secure life and an end to their existence as refugees,” Bowden says.

Marisa married another Italian and had children, but she became an Australian citizen when Bowden’s mother was six. Because Australia followed ius soli at the time, this created the minor issue for her descendants.

Bowden, who works in local government in Melbourne, now hopes to restore formal recognition of his grandmother’s Italian citizenship.

“She regards Australia as home, but she still feels like an Italian who happens to live in Australia,” he says. The family had assumed for decades that her original documents had been lost or destroyed. Last year, however, they located her birth certificate with assistance from Milan-based genealogist Daniele Sedda.

“Nonna always said, ‘I know who I am, but I imagine the records no longer exist,’” Bowden says. “I want her identity returned to her. When she opened the package containing documents from her earlier life, she said, ‘I did not think I needed this, but now that it is here, I feel overwhelmed.’”

“It is a vital part of our identity,” says Bowden, who recently visited his great-grandfather’s grave in Trieste. “I am learning Italian and trying to pass it on to my children. As Nonna gets older, her English is beginning to fade and she increasingly returns to her first language, so the Italian side of our lives becomes more visible each year. I want her identity restored, and I would love my children to have the opportunity to live and work in Italy.”

Under the minor issue, Marisa could not transmit citizenship to her daughter or grandchildren. Once the family learned about the restriction, they paused their plans to apply.

“Nonna is more disappointed for us than for herself,” Bowden said before the decision. “If the possibility disappeared forever, it would be devastating.”

Because of the persistence of Monasterios and the two American families whose cases reached the Cassazione, Bowden’s ambition is still possible.

Last Monday, Monasterios was attending a meeting when he noticed a missed call from Restanio. “I looked at my phone and saw her message: ‘Ganamos,’ meaning ‘We won.’ I was completely overjoyed,” he says. While he called his family by video to share the result, Restanio went to church to express her gratitude. “It was the first thing I felt compelled to do because my heart was full of thanks,” she says.

The victory has renewed hope for hundreds of thousands of people across the Italian diaspora who lacked the money or time required to pursue a lawsuit all the way to the supreme court.

“There were times when I told myself to abandon it,” Monasterios says. “We have spent the past decade dealing with this. The paperwork is exhausting, the financial cost is substantial, and the uncertainty damages your mental health. I sometimes wondered why I should continue when it demanded so much from me.

“But we reminded ourselves that our goal was to win the war, and losing individual battles can be part of eventually achieving that victory.”