‘It’s about equality:’ The families who were ripped apart by Italy’s new citizenship laws
By Julia Buckley, CNN
(CNN) — On Sunday night, Gustavo Monasterios went to sleep as a Venezuelan citizen. On Monday morning, he awoke to find that he was also an Italian.
Monasterios, 47, was at the epicenter of the legal earthquake that took place in Italy last week.
After nearly two years of steady restrictions on citizenship by descent, during which the government barred the way to an Italian passport for swathes of the diaspora through a series of rulings, Italy’s supreme court overturned one of the restrictions — thanks to a lawsuit Monasterios brought.
The so-called “minor issue,” which had ended the dreams of citizenship for hundreds of thousands of Italian descendants, particularly in the Americas, was abolished.
Monasterios — who had lost his initial suit for citizenship in 2021, as well as his appeal in 2023 — had made a last-gasp appeal to the Corte di Cassazione, Italy’s supreme court, through his attorney, Monica Restanio.
Against the odds, Restanio’s arguments against the “minor issue” won the day. The Sezioni Unite — the highest rung of the Cassazione — accepted her arguments and overturned previous rulings, including one by a lower tier of the Cassazione which had upheld the minor issue as recently as 2024.
The diaspora in the Americas had been hit particularly hard by the minor issue because countries on the continent tend to operate under “ius soli,” granting citizenship to anyone born on their territory. Children born to Italian citizens in the likes of the US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Monasterios’ native Venezuela were being judged to have lost their Italian citizenship if their parents naturalized in the new country.
First applied by a few individual judges in 2019, it was rubber-stamped by a lower section of the supreme court in 2023, which led to regional judges across the country, who rule on citizenship cases, applying it to would-be citizens. A government circular to consulates in October 2024 was the death knell.
The rulings wiped out the dreams of thousands of Italian descendants who had been hoping to achieve citizenship, derailing life plans and splitting families apart.
Monasterios was one of them.
His grandmother, Rina Laveder, had moved from the mountainous Dolomites in the Veneto region to Venezuela as a child. She’d married a local man, and naturalized in 1956.
His father, also called Gustavo, who was also on the lawsuit, was born in 1944, while his mother was still an Italian citizen. Gustavo’s brother, Pedro, was born two years later.
While foreign minister Antonio Tajani, who introduced the 2025 reforms, has scathingly spoken about “fake Italians” in the diaspora, Monasterios was born in 1979 to a family that, he says, felt Italian. “We grew up listening to the language and my grandmother would frequently read us letters and show us postcards that arrived from Italy,” he says.
“She never lost her Italian identity — it was as if she were still living there. Being Italian was the core message she passed on to us. In Venezuela, part of your DNA is Italian.”
In 2001, following Rina’s death, the family flew to Italy to visit their relatives. In 2005, Monasterios studied for his masters degree in Milan — “to get closer to Italy and understand more about where my grandmother came from,” he says. He wasn’t the only one. His sister ended up marrying an Italian man, and in 2016, Monasterios’ cousins decided to acquire Italian citizenship.
The route to an Italian passport tends to be far more onerous for those descended from women than from men. Until 1948, women were barred from passing citizenship to their own children, meaning that Gustavo and Pedro Monasterios were born Venezuelan, despite their mother being Italian. “It is, plain and simple, discrimination against women,” says Monasterios.
In 2009, the supreme court overturned this gender discrimination retroactively. Those with the funds to file a court case, essentially suing the Italian state for sexism against their female ancestors, are likely to win, but legal action is lengthy and costly.
Following his cousins’ success, Monasterios — along with his parents and brother — filed a case in 2018. By the time it came to court, in 2021, the “minor issue” had appeared. The family’s case was rejected — despite being first and second generation, and despite Pedro Monasterios and his children having been recognized as citizens just a few years earlier. The same family — Rita’s children and her grandchildren — had been judged differently.
“I had all the ingredients of being Italian, but still didn’t have the last steps,” says Monasterios, who already lives in Europe, working as a project officer for a major international organization.
“To see a family divided by a technicality, when we share the same bloodline and the same history, was very difficult to accept.
“It’s about equality. Everyone should have the same rights.”
‘The family is split for good’
The Monasterios family was not the only one split by the minor issue. Joseph Spinelle, an American-Italian, has been separated from his family for two years, after the rule change blocked his relatives from getting citizenship as he had.
The extended family — Spinelle’s mother, brother, aunt, sister and nieces — had planned to get citizenship and move to Italy, where his great-grandparents were from.
But with the family spread out around the US, trying to secure appointments with the consulates — where the waiting lists can top years — proved impossible.
Spinelle, 54, and his wife Alisa, who’d been living in Arkansas, found it “functionally impossible” to book an appointment at their nearest consulate in Houston. But they knew that descendants can also move to Italy and complete the process there.
“My wife said, ‘What if we just move to Italy? So we thought, ok, we’ll upend our lives and go.”
After five years of trying to get a consulate appointment, they moved in early 2024. By June, Spinelle was recognized as an Italian citizen, backdated to his birth. Having sold everything they owned in Arkansas, they bought a house in Lecce, in the southern region of Puglia, and waited for the rest of the family.
Four months later, the minor issue hit, blocking their relatives’ paths to citizenship. His sister had managed to book an appointment at a consulate to register her citizenship, but with no grace period allowed, it was now void. The plan for the extended family to live in Italy was over. Even Spinelle’s mother — whose grandparents had moved to the US from Italy — was barred. In a Kafkaesque situation, although she’d been recognized as a dormant citizen during his own application process, she was now deemed to have never been Italian.
Speaking before the Cassazione delivered its ruling, Spinelle had been coming to terms with being separated from his family for good.
His mother and brother had been in the process of buying a house in Abruzzo, to live near him, while his niece had planned to apply to study in Italy.
Instead, blocked by the law, his mother and brother had moved to South Carolina.
“Instead of moving to the next region over to me, where I could take the train and go see them all the time, it’s now a $10,000 trip to see them,” he said. “It’s terrible. She’s 80, so asking her to move multiple times is out of the question.
“As she gets older, what am I going to do? The family is split for good — the consequences on people are just enormous. It makes me so sad, and I’m one of the lucky ones.
“I can’t move back — I spent my last dollars on the house here. I wasn’t just buying a property, I was making a statement — this is where I plan to live until I die. I don’t know how to emotionally get my head around the impossibility of being with family for the rest of my life.”
Speaking after the minor issue was overturned, Spinelle was jubilant — but he still doesn’t know if his family will be reunited. The March 2025 law introduced a two-generation limit, cutting out his siblings. In May 2025, it was further restricted to add that the Italian ancestor must have died an exclusively Italian citizen, essentially outlawing dual citizenship for the diaspora.
“As of right now, they’re blocked, but I think if the law was reversed they would likely move out here — my mom has her heart set on a nice little place in Abruzzo,” he said.
‘We’re not going to give up’
Cheryl Ossola is another Italian-American in limbo. All four of her grandparents were born and raised in Italy; in 2018, the then 62-year-old former magazine editor moved to Perugia, in the central Umbria region, on a temporary visa at the same time as filing a lawsuit for citizenship.
“I thought I’d have a visa for a year and then be recognized as a citizen; it didn’t work out that way,” she says from Perugia, where she is still registered as a visa-holding American.
Her maternal grandmother emigrated from the southern Campania region as a child, and married a Lazio man in Syracuse, New York. Her grandmother naturalized when Ossola’s mother was 19 — still before the age of majority in the US. That meant that she had the “minor issue” — her late mother had suddenly been judged to have lost her Italian citizenship from the grave. Her case was heard in 2019: “The judge rejected us because of the minor issue, which of course had never been an issue until it was,” she says ruefully.
As a resident, Ossola had another route to an Italian passport. Those with Italian grandparents enjoy an expedited two-year naturalization process. She could have started the paperwork in 2020.
But she was adamant that she didn’t want to naturalize; she wanted what she believed was her blood right. She also wanted to be able to pass citizenship on to her two children, who hoped to move over at a later stage.
So, she kept fighting.
“I’ve always identified strongly with my Italian roots — it’s why I live in Italy,” she says. “As a child, I said, ‘Some day I’ll live in Italy.’ And yes, I could continue on my long-term visa, but I want to vote in my community, and be a full member of society. To me, citizenship via iure sanguinis [by descent] is the true bloodline recognition. I have it, and I want it recognized. So we’re not going to give up — it’s too important.”
Ossola, now 70, appealed her 2019 rejection, and lost her long-awaited appeal in 2024. Through her attorney, Marco Mellone — another attorney who argued against the minor issue at April’s successful hearing, and is one of those leading the charge against the new legislation — she appealed to the Cassazione. Her case was scheduled to be heard in October 2026, but has been suspended. Ossola believes that following the Sezioni Unite’s ruling, she will be booted back to the appeal court in Rome, and now that the minor issue has been abolished, she and her kids should be a shoo-in for citizenship.
“For the most part our families emigrated out of need,” she says. “They traveled back and forth at great hardship to see family. It’s a recognition of what our ancestors went through to make better lives for us.”
‘An important part of who we are’
While the likes of Ossola wait patiently for their cases to be resolved, others are carefully monitoring the situation.
Australian Mitchell Bowden, 36, has been dreaming of citizenship as a way to honor his grandmother.
Nonna Marisa Carpenetti was born in 1938 in Istria, now part of Croatia but at the time occupied by Italy. After World War II, the territory was handed over to Yugoslavia. “Alongside thousands of Italians from Istria, she and her parents walked back to Italy, and were told, ‘We don’t want you,’” says Bowden. “They were essentially refugees.”
After her father died during a stint of temporary housing in Trieste, Italy’s new bordertown, Marisa was sent to live in an orphanage as her mother worked.
Eventually, the family emigrated Down Under. “They moved for the Australian dream, for a better life, and to no longer be refugees,” says Bowden.
His grandmother married another Italian and had kids, but naturalized as Australian when his mother was six years old, creating the minor issue (Australia was a ius soli country at the time).
Now, Bowden, who works in local government in Melbourne, wants to recover her citizenship.
“She sees Australia as home but feels like an Italian living in Australia,” he says. The family had long assumed that her records had been destroyed, but last year, they found her birth certificate with the help of Daniele Sedda, a Milan-based genealogist.
“Nonna has always had the attitude of ‘I know who I am but I assume all records have gone,” says Bowden. “But I want her to have her identity back. When nonna opened the package and saw all the documents of her past life, she was like ‘I didn’t need this, but now it’s here I’m emotional.’”
“It’s a really important part of who we are,” says Bowden, who recently visited his great-grandfather’s grave in Trieste. “I’m studying Italian, and trying to teach my kids. Nonna is getting older and starting to regress in English and revert to her mother tongue so it’s becoming even more of our lives as the years go on. I want her to have her identity back and I’d love my kids to have the possibility to work and live over there.”
The minor issue meant that Marisa couldn’t pass on citizenship to her daughter or grandchildren. When they found out about the rule, they put their plans to apply on hold.
“Nonna is disappointed for us more than for herself,” said Bowden, speaking before the ruling. “To have it off the table forever would be devastating.”
Now, thanks to the tenacity of Monasterios and the two American families who appealed to the Cassazione, his dream remains alive.
Last Monday, Monasterios was in a meeting when he saw a missed call from his attorney, Restanio. “I checked my phone to find a WhatsApp: ‘Ganamos’ [We have won]. I was utterly elated,” he says. While he video-called his family with the news, Restanio went to church to give thanks. “It was the first thing I felt I had to do, with my heart full of gratitude,” she says.
Their win has given hope to hundreds of thousands across the diaspora who couldn’t afford the time or the money to see a lawsuit through to the supreme court.
“There were moments when I thought, ‘Give up,’” says Monasterios. “We’ve been in this for the past 10 years. It’s a lot of paperwork, a big financial burden, and not knowing what’s going to happen affects your mental health. I felt, why should I continue when it’s costing me so much?
“But we said, we’re here to win the war, and losing battles are part of winning the war.”
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