‘It’s about equality:’ The families who were ripped apart by Italy’s new citizenship laws

Gustavo Monasterios, a citizen of Venezuela, went to bed on Sunday night. He discovered that he was also Italian when he woke up on Monday morning.

The 47-year-old Monasterios was at the center of last week’s legal earthquake in Italy.

Thanks to a lawsuit Monasterios filed, Italy’s supreme court invalidated one of the government’s nearly two-year-long limits on citizenship by descent, which prevented large segments of the diaspora from obtaining an Italian passport through a series of rulings.

The “minor issue,” which had prevented hundreds of thousands of Italian descendants, especially in the Americas, from pursuing citizenship, was eliminated.

Through his lawyer, Monica Restanio, Monasterios, who had lost both his initial citizenship lawsuit in 2021 and his appeal in 2023, filed a last appeal with Italy’s supreme court, the Corte di Cassazione.

Restanio’s arguments against the “minor issue” prevailed despite the odds. The highest level of the Cassazione, the Sezioni Unite, acknowledged her reasoning and reversed earlier decisions, including one from a lower level of the Cassazione that had upheld the minor problem as recently as 2024.

Because nations on the region often operate under “ius soli,” which grants citizenship to anybody born on their territory, the small issue had notably affected the diaspora in the Americas. If their parents naturalized in the new nation, children born to Italian citizens in the US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Monasterios’ home country of Venezuela were deemed to have lost their Italian citizenship.

It was first implemented by a small number of judges in 2019. In 2023, a lower division of the Supreme Court rubber-stamped it, and as a result, regional judges nationwide who make decisions on citizenship issues began applying it to prospective citizens. The final straw was a government circular sent to consulates in October 2024.

Thousands of Italian descendants’ hopes of obtaining citizenship were dashed by the verdicts, which caused life plans to fall apart and families to become divided.

Among them was Monasterios.

When he was a toddler, his grandmother, Rina Laveder, relocated to Venezuela from the Veneto region’s rugged Dolomites. In 1956, she became a naturalized citizen after marrying a local man.

His mother was still an Italian citizen when his father, Gustavo, who was also involved in the lawsuit, was born in 1944. Pedro, Gustavo’s sibling, was born two years later.

Monasterios was born in 1979 into a family who, according to him, felt Italian, despite the fact that foreign minister Antonio Tajani, who proposed the 2025 revisions, has harshly criticized “fake Italians” in the diaspora. “My grandmother would regularly read us letters and show us postcards that arrived from Italy, and we grew up listening to the language,” he adds.

It was as though she were still residing in Italy, and she never lost her Italian identity. The main lesson she imparted to us was that we are Italian. You have some Italian ancestry in Venezuela.

After Rina passed away in 2001, the family took a plane to Italy to see their relatives. In order “to get closer to Italy and understand more about where my grandmother came from,” Monasterios pursued his master’s degree in Milan in 2005. It wasn’t just him. In 2016, Monasterios’ cousins made the decision to become Italian citizens, and his sister eventually wed an Italian guy.

For people descended from women, obtaining an Italian passport is typically far more difficult than for men. Despite having an Italian mother, Gustavo and Pedro Monasterios were born in Venezuela because women were not allowed to grant citizenship to their own children until 1948. According to Monasterios, “it is discrimination against women, plain and simple.

The Supreme Court reversed this discrimination based on gender in 2009. Legal action is expensive and time-consuming, but those who can afford to sue the Italian government for sexism against their female forebears are likely to prevail.

In 2018, Monasterios, his parents, and his brother launched a lawsuit in response to his cousins’ success. The “minor issue” had emerged by the time it was brought before the court in 2021. Despite Pedro Monasterios and his children being first- and second-generation citizens only a few years prior, the family’s appeal was denied. The same family—Rita’s grandchildren and children—had received disparate evaluations.

Monasterios, who currently resides in Europe and works as a project officer for a significant multinational organization, says, “I had all the ingredients of being Italian, but still didn’t have the last steps.

It was really hard to understand that a family with the same ancestry and history could be split apart over a technicality.

It has to do with equality. Everybody ought to be entitled to the same rights.

‘The family is split for good’

The small disagreement divided more than just the Monasterios family. Since the law change prevented his relatives from obtaining citizenship as he did, Joseph Spinelle, an American-Italian, has been isolated from his family for two years.

The small disagreement divided more than just the Monasterios family. Since the law change prevented his relatives from obtaining citizenship as he did, Joseph Spinelle, an American-Italian, has been isolated from his family for two years.

However, because the family was dispersed throughout the United States, it was difficult to get appointments with the consulates, where waiting lists might reach years.

It was “functionally impossible” for Spinelle, 54, and his wife Alisa, who had been residing in Arkansas, to make an appointment at the closest embassy in Houston. However, they were aware that descendants may relocate to Italy and finish the procedure there.

“What if we simply relocate to Italy?” my spouse asked. We decided to upend our lives and go.

They relocated in early 2024 after attempting to obtain a consulate appointment for five years. By June, Spinelle’s Italian citizenship was acknowledged, going back to the time of his birth. They bought a home in Lecce, in southern Puglia, after selling everything they owned in Arkansas, and they waited for the rest of the family.

The small problem occurred four months later, preventing their relatives from obtaining citizenship. Although his sister was able to schedule an appointment at a consulate to register her citizenship, it was now null and void because there was no grace time permitted. The extended family’s intention to relocate to Italy had come to an end. Even Spinelle’s mother, whose Italian grandparents had immigrated to the US, was prohibited. In a Kafkaesque scenario, she was now considered to have never been Italian, despite having been acknowledged as a latent citizen during his own application procedure.

Speaking prior to the Cassazione’s decision, Spinelle had been accepting his permanent separation from his family.

While his niece intended to apply to study in Italy, his mother and brother were in the process of purchasing a home in Abruzzo to live close to him.

Rather, his mother and brother had relocated to South Carolina due to legal obstacles.

“It’s now a $10,000 trip to see them, instead of moving to the next region over to me, where I could take the train and go there all the time,” he remarked. “It’s awful. Since she is eighty, it is not feasible to ask her to move several times.

What will I do as she grows older? The family is permanently divided; the effects on individuals are just profound. I’m among the fortunate ones, and that makes me very sad.

“I spent my last cash on this house, so I can’t go back. This is where I intend to live until I die, so I wasn’t simply purchasing a home; I was also making a statement. I’m not sure how to emotionally comprehend the impossibility of spending the rest of my life with relatives.

Spinelle was ecstatic when the tiny issue was resolved, but he is still unsure if his family will be reunited. His siblings were excluded under the two-generation cap imposed by the March 2025 law. Dual citizenship for the diaspora was effectively outlawed in May 2025 when it was further narrowed to include the requirement that the Italian ancestor must have died an Italian citizen.

“They’re blocked right now, but I think they would probably move out here if the law was reversed—my mom has her sights set on a nice little place in Abruzzo,” he remarked.

‘We’re not going to give up’

Another Italian-American in limbo is Cheryl Ossola. The 62-year-old former magazine editor came to Perugia in the middle Umbria region in 2018 on a temporary visa while simultaneously pursuing a lawsuit for citizenship. All four of her grandparents were born and raised in Italy.

She explains from Perugia, where she is still listed as an American with a visa, “I thought I’d have a visa for a year and then be recognized as a citizen; it didn’t work out that way.

Her maternal grandmother married a Lazio man in Syracuse, New York, after leaving the southern Campania region when she was a little girl. Ossola’s mother was 19 when her grandmother became a naturalized citizen, which was still before the US legal age of majority. This indicated that she had a “minor issue” because her late mother’s Italian citizenship had been abruptly revoked. “The judge rejected us because of the minor issue, which of course had never been an issue until it was,” she laments when her case was heard in 2019.

Ossola had an alternative path to an Italian passport as a resident. The naturalization procedure is accelerated to two years for those with Italian grandparents.

However, Italy’s new citizenship laws she was insistent that she wanted what she thought was her blood right and didn’t want to naturalize. In addition, she wanted to be able to grant her two children citizenship because they intended to immigrate in the future.

She continued to fight as a result.

She explains, “I live in Italy because I’ve always identified strongly with my Italian roots.” “When I was younger, I dreamed of living in Italy someday. Yes, I could stay on my long-term visa, but I want to participate fully in society and cast a ballot in my town. Citizenship via iure sanguinis [by descent] is, in my opinion, the genuine acknowledgment of ancestry. I want it acknowledged because I have it. Therefore, we won’t give up since it’s too crucial.

The 70-year-old Ossola filed an appeal after being rejected in 2019, but it was denied in 2024. She filed an appeal with the Cassazione through her lawyer, Marco Mellone, who also argued against the small issue in April’s successful hearing and is one of those spearheading the opposition to the new laws. The October 2026 hearing for her case has been postponed. Ossola thinks she will be sent back to the Rome appeal court after the Sezioni Unite’s decision, and because the small issue has been eliminated, she and her children should be granted citizenship.

“Most of our families left because they were in need,” she says. They endured a great deal of difficulty while traveling back and forth to visit relatives. It’s an acknowledgment of the struggles our forefathers endured to improve our lives.

‘An important part of who we are’

Some are keeping a close eye on the situation while others, like Ossola, wait patiently for their cases to be settled.

Mitchell Bowden, a 36-year-old Australian, has been hoping to become a citizen in remembrance of his grandmother.

In 1938, Nonna Marisa Carpenetti was born in Istria, which was then under Italian occupation but is today a part of Croatia. The region was given to Yugoslavia following World War II. “She and her parents walked back to Italy with thousands of Italians from Istria, and they were told, ‘We don’t want you,'” recounts Bowden. “In essence, they were refugees.

Marisa was placed in an orphanage while her mother worked after her father passed away when she was living in temporary accommodation in Trieste, Italy’s newest bordertown.

The family eventually moved to Australia. According to Bowden, “they moved for the Australian dream, for a better life, and to no longer be refugees.

The small issue arises because his grandmother married another Italian, had children, and became an Australian citizen when his mother was six years old (Australia was a ius soli nation at the time).

Bowden, a Melbourne local government employee, now wishes to regain her citizenship.

He claims, “She feels like an Italian living in Australia, but she sees Australia as home.” With the assistance of Milan-based genealogist Daniele Sedda last year, the family—who had long believed that her paperwork had been destroyed—found her birth certificate.

“Nonna has always had the attitude of ‘I know who I am but I assume all records have gone,” adds Bowden. However, I want her to regain her identity. When nonna opened the package and saw all the records of her old life, she was like ‘I didn’t need this, but now it’s here I’m emotional.’

Bowden, who just went to his great-grandfather’s cemetery in Trieste, says, “It’s a really important part of who we are.” “I’m attempting to teach my children as I study Italian. As we get older, Nonna is beginning to revert to her mother tongue and regress in English, so it will become increasingly more of a part of our life. I would wish for her to regain her identity and for my children to be able to live and work there.

Due to the small matter, Marisa was unable to grant her daughter or grandchildren citizenship. They postponed their plans to apply after learning about the rule.

Before the decision, Bowden stated, “Nonna is disappointed for us more than for herself.” “It would be devastating to have it off the table forever.

His ambition is still alive today because of Monasterios’ perseverance and the two American families that persuaded the Cassazione.

Monasterios saw a missed call from his lawyer, Restanio, last Monday when he was at a meeting. “I looked at my phone and saw a WhatsApp message that said, ‘Ganamos’ [We’ve won]. He recalls, “I was completely thrilled. Restanio went to church to express gratitude while he video-called his family to share the news. “With my heart full of gratitude, it was the first thing I felt I had to do,” she adds.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the diaspora who lacked the resources to pursue a case all the way to the Supreme Court now have hope thanks to their victory.

“There were times when I felt like giving up,” admits Monasterios. “We’ve spent the last ten years in this situation. There is a lot of paperwork, a significant financial strain, and your mental health is impacted by not knowing what will happen. Why should I keep going when it’s costing me so much, I thought?

“However, we stated that losing battles is a necessary part of winning the war. We are here to win the war.