At the start of 2025, relocation expert Jennifer Sontag had seven clients who were seeking Italian citizenship through descent and were ready to move.
Those plans were brought to an abrupt end when Italy suddenly tightened its rules on claiming citizenship via ancestry last March.
“All seven remain in the United States because they lost the citizenship pathway on which their moves had been based and did not qualify for Italy’s existing visa categories,” Sontag tells The Local.
Sontag, the CEO and founder of the ViaMonde agency, has seen many cases like this since the reform.
“We had clients who had already booked flights, signed leases, sold homes, begun property searches, or entered into relocation contracts with us because they expected to establish their lives in Italy under the law as it existed when they started planning.”
The law change immediately applied a two-generational limit, meaning applicants born abroad must now have a parent or grandparent who held only Italian citizenship, or held it at the time of their death, with a couple of exceptions.
READ ALSO: Who can still apply for Italian citizenship via ancestry?
This new limit has since been contested in the courts, and was this week referred to the European Court of Justice - giving claimants new hope that it could be struck down.
But its impact has already been far-reaching. Many hundreds of thousands of would-be Italian passport holders face uncertainty, as does an entire industry that had grown around Italian “roots tourism” with the encouragement of the state.
“The government commissioned substantial research into the Italian diaspora and invested significant public funding in developing roots tourism as a national strategy,” Sontag says.
The change came less than a year after the peak of a government campaign that had spent heavily promoting ‘roots tourism’, aimed at the same people eager to have their Italian citizenship via ancestry recognised.
The €20 million Italea programme, funded through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) for 2022 to 2025, commissioned research into the Italian diaspora and built roots tourism into a national strategy, culminating in 2024’s Year of the Italian Roots in the World.
Sontag attended a roots tourism convention in Palermo in late 2024, with “hundreds of participants, including tourism officials, local organisations, guides, transportation providers, researchers, and businesses being encouraged to prepare for an influx of descendants.”
Italy’s national tourism agency ENIT estimated 8 million “roots tourists” in 1997. That figure fell during the pandemic, then recovered to 6.6 million in 2024, with 7.4 million projected for 2026, according to the Foreign Ministry.
Announcing the 2024 project, Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani said roots tourism was a “golden opportunity to fortify our connections with our communities overseas and to shed light on the small hamlets and rural communities that stand at the origin of their migration story,” L’Italo Americano reported.
READ ALSO: How descendants of Italians can move to Italy under new rules
“Italian descendants were an obvious audience for those programmes because they already had a personal reason to choose one town over another,” Sontag says.
The bigger hope was that they’d form an ongoing relationship with a town: returning regularly, buying property, opening businesses, eventually relocating - the same audience Italy’s small towns have spent recent years courting with schemes like one-euro homes to offset falling populations.
“Before the decree, roots tourism was being presented as a major national initiative,” Sontag says.
“Afterwards, the marketing seemed to stop almost overnight. From where I was sitting professionally, it felt as though the contradiction had become difficult to address publicly, so the promotion simply faded away.”
Sontag thinks Italy has “shot itself in the foot” with the reform.
“The greatest value of roots tourism was never a week in a hotel,” she says. “It was the possibility that someone would return, renovate a home, pay local taxes, rent year-round, support businesses outside the summer season, and eventually become part of the town.”
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