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Did you know…? Italy has one of the world’s most powerful passports

Italy is renowned as one of the world's top tourist destinations, but less well known is that holding an Italian passport also gives you privileged access to a host of other countries.

Published: 11 April 2024 11:12 CEST

Did you know...? Italy has one of the world’s most powerful passports

Italy has the world's second most powerful passport after Singapore. Photo by Agus Dietrich on Unsplash

From Marco Polo to Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, Italy has produced some world-famous explorers and navigators down the centuries – so it seems fitting that Italians have one of the world’s strongest passports today.

According to VisaGuide.World’s 2024 Passport Index, which ranks 199 countries’ passports according to a range of factors, Italy has the world’s second most powerful passport after Singapore.

READ ALSO: How foreigners can get ‘fast track’ citizenship in Italy

It’s followed by Spain, France and Germany, with Hungary, Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium rounding out the top ten.

The score is based on criteria including how many countries the passport allows you to travel to without a visa, whether a destination allows you to buy a visa on arrival, and whether any countries have blacklisted your passport altogether.

An Italian passport allows you to travel to 161 countries visa-free, 44 countries with only an ID card, and 20 countries on an e-Visa (which can be bought online).

READ ALSO: Did you know…? There’s an Italian region that doesn’t exist

By comparison, a Singaporean passport will get you into 167 countries and territories without a visa, and a US passport, all the way down in 39th place, into 151.

A powerful passport is a nice perk of being an Italian national – but if you’re not born Italian and don’t have Italian ancestry, Italy doesn’t make it easy to acquire citizenship.

READ ALSO: Will my children get an Italian passport if born in Italy?

You’ll need ten years of uninterrupted residency in Italy to naturalise or two years of marriage to an Italian citizen (three, if you live abroad) before you’re eligible to begin the application process, which can take years.

Find out more about applying for an Italian passport.

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Italy rolls out new ‘priority line’ for urgent passport requests

The new booking system, officially called the Agenda Prioritaria (or ‘Priority Agenda’), was launched on the Italian State Police portal on Friday.

The priority line was to allow citizens in urgent need of a new passport to get their application (or renewal) appointment in under 15 days and a new document within a maximum of 30 days, according to media reports.

Priority booking will be available to applicants who can prove that they need a new passport for reasons related to health (for instance, planned medical procedures or visits), study (scholarships, research projects, admission procedures, etc.), work trips, or tourism.

The launch of the new system came after applicants reported wait times of up to ten months for passport application appointments at their local police headquarters (Questura) last year, with delays largely attributed to post-Covid backlogs and higher numbers of citizenship requests.

READ ALSO: Italy grants citizenship to more people than any other EU country, study finds

It also followed recent reports that lengthy wait times for passport application or renewal requests caused the cancellation of nearly 170,000 international trips between 2022 and 2023, resulting in losses of up to 300 million euros for the national tourism industry.

The new priority line can be accessed by logging onto the State Police passport portal (available to people who have SPID or electronic ID card credentials) and selecting Appuntamenti Prioritari (‘Priority Bookings’).

READ ALSO: Will my children get an Italian passport if born in Italy?

Applicants will be asked to justify the urgency of their request by completing a self-certification (autocertificazione) form online. All documents will then have to be produced at the scheduled appointment at the local Questura.

Anyone found to have used the priority line without meeting the necessary requirements could face criminal charges, according to reports.

READ ALSO: Italian passport ranked world’s second ‘most powerful’

Italy issued a total of 2.75 million passports in 2023, up by around a million compared to any pre-Covid year on record, according to data provided by Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi last January.

The trend seems to be continuing this year as Italy released over 412,000 passports in the first two months of 2024 alone.

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