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NATURALIZATION

How many people does Italy grant citizenship to?

Thinking of applying to become Italian? Here's how many other people do it each year, where they come from and how they qualify.

Published: 14 January 2020 16:54 CET
How many people does Italy grant citizenship to?
How many people get their hands on an Italian passport? Photo: DepositPhotos

How many people get Italian citizenship each year?

A total of 112,523 people were granted Italian citizenship in 2018, the last year for which official data is available. 

That's a decrease of around 24 percent from 2017, when 146,605 people became Italian. In fact the number has been declining since 2016, when successful citizenship requests spiked at 201,591.

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The rate has now roughly returned to the same level as 2013, when Italy granted 100,712 people citizenship.

In total, Italy was home to more than 1.34 million 'new Italians' in January 2018.

Where do most 'new Italians' come from?

In 2018 the vast majority of people acquiring citizenship came from outside the European Union: 103,478 or roughly 92 percent. (The trend is logical, since people with EU passports already enjoy most of the same rights in Italy as Italians and therefore have less incentive to apply for citizenship.)

The highest number of successful applications came from Albanians (21,841), followed by Moroccans (15,496), Brazilians (10,660), Romanians (6,542), Indians (5,425), Macedonians (3,487), Senegalese (2,918), Tunisians (2,484) and Ukrainians (2,423).

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Citizens of Albania and Morocco have made up the top two since at least 2012, with as many as 36,920 Albanians and 35,212 Moroccans gaining Italian citizenship when claims were at their height in 2016.

Meanwhile Brazil has seen successful citizenship requests increase more than sevenfold since 2012.

Other nationalities are far less likely to apply for Italian citizenship despite having a relatively large immigrant population in Italy: notably, less than 5 percent of Italy's Chinese residents have acquired Italian citizenship, presumably because China does not permit dual nationality.


Celebrating Chinese New Year in Rome. Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

How do most people qualify for Italian citizenship?

In 2018, the most common way to acquire citizenship was either by descent (ius sanguinis, which allows those who can prove descent from at least one Italian ancestor to claim Italian citizenship), by birthright (ius soli, which entitles people born and raised in Italy by non-Italian parents to claim Italian citizenship from 18), or by parental transmission (the law that automatically transfers citizenship to the children of adults who acquire citizenship, provided they're under 18 and living with them at the time).

Altogether 48,910 people qualified for Italian citizenship via one of these three routes in 2018, around 43 percent of the total. Another 39,453 people (35 percent) qualified via residency in Italy, while 24,160 (21 percent) qualified by marriage to an Italian national.

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While residency used to form the basis of most citizenship claims, the number of successful requests on these grounds has been falling since 2016. Between 2017 and 2018 such claims fell by around 23,000 or 37 percent.

Claims via marriage, meanwhile, increased by around 9 percent in 2018 (+2,000), with the vast majority – 85 of every 100 – made by women.

But one of the most notable trends is the rise in the number of people successfully claiming Italian citizenship by descent. In 2016, the year that Italy's statistics office began tracking such claims, some 7,000 people gained citizenship this way; in 2017 it was over 8,200, and in 2018 it reached 9,000.

The majority of ius sanguinis claims come from just one country: Brazil, which saw roughly 7,000 people gain Italian citizenship by descent in 2018.


Photo: DepositPhotos

Where in Italy do most people get citizenship?

The part of Italy with the most successful citizenship claims in 2018 was the north-west (43,962) and especially the region of Lombardy, which alone accounted for 30,474. 

Other regions where high numbers of people gained citizenship were Veneto (15,536), Emilia-Romagna (13,446), Piedmont (9,801) and Tuscany (9,349). While Lazio, the region of Rome, has a high foreign-born population, just 6,943 people took Italian citizenship there.

The regions handing out the fewest new citizenships, meanwhile, were Basilicata (252), Valle d'Aosta (316), Molise (426) and Sardinia (644).

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The further north you go, the more people base their claim on residency – reflecting the fact that the wealthy north has long attracted migrants looking for work.

In the south, meanwhile, and especially the regions of Campania, Calabria, Basilicata and Molise, the majority of citizenship claims were based on ancestry, the legacy of decades of emigration overseas from deprived parts of southern Italy.

What else do we know about people who apply for citizenship in Italy?

They're mainly women (61,321 in 2018 compared to 51,202 men), and they're mainly young: the largest age group is under-20s, who accounted for 39,945 citizenships granted in 2018.

People aged 20-39 made up another 37,364, while 40-59-year-olds numbered 31,519. The number of people over 60 who acquired Italian citizenship was just 3,695.

READ ALSO: 'How I got an elective residency visa to retire in Italy'


Photo: DepositPhotos

All data referred to in this article comes from Istat, Italy's national statistics office.

Member comments

  1. This article would be a lot more helpful if it told us how many unsuccessful applications there were. How many people who applied were denied? Also, for those of us descended from the immigrant generation that was forced to renounce Italian citizenship in order to become US citizens, the rules are different. We need to be residents for three years, right? Are there any statistics available, or are those applications so rare that they don’t count them?

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ITALIAN CITIZENSHIP

How ancestry detectives help Americans and Brits find their Italian roots

Whether it's for a citizenship application or just to satisfy curiosity, tracking down long-lost Italian ancestors can be a difficult task. Reporter Silvia Marchetti finds out exactly what one Sicilian family tree researcher's work involves.

Published: 20 March 2024 11:53 CET
Updated: 24 March 2024 07:42 CET
How ancestry detectives help Americans and Brits find their Italian roots

Fabio Cardile from Palermo has a very peculiar job. For 25 years he’s been working as a family tree researcher for American and European clients interested in discovering their Italian origins.

They have an Italian background and an Italian-sounding last name, but have no idea who their ancestors were and, in most cases, don’t even know from where they migrated. 

“I started doing these investigations first by dedicating myself to researching the origin of my own last name, Cardile, where exactly my family came from,” 44-year-old Cardile tells The Local.

“Then this passion turned into a job, and now I have clients from abroad contacting me and hiring me to dig into their family history and unearth information on their ancestral backgrounds.”

He was the one who discovered the origin of the last name of American actor John Travolta, and he also carried out research on the origins of Jill Biden’s Sicilian heritage. 

In all cases, these are stories of Italian immigrants who left their homes decades, if not centuries ago, to find a brighter future in the US or in Europe, including the UK, France and Germany. 

“In the hardest cases all clients are able to give me is their last name and I need to trace back in time the origin of it and the location in Italy where still nowadays there are similar-sounding names.”

READ ALSO: An expert guide to getting Italian citizenship via ancestry

What makes his job particularly tough is that most immigrants, when they landed in their country of destination, changed their surname by adapting it linguistically to the community they had moved to.

“It was very common for immigrants in the past to make their names sound American or English in order to adapt, be accepted by the local community and find a job more easily. They did not want to stand out from the crowd as Italians and be discriminated against in any way,” says Cardile.

Fabio Cardile has worked as a family tree researcher for 25 years. Photo: Fabio Cardile

Cardile’s job is very complex. He starts his investigations by digging into state records, as well local parish and graveyard archives, for ancient documents to support the ancestry claims of his foreign clients, who are pushed by a nostalgic need to reconnect with their forsaken roots.

He starts off with some online tools: four basic websites (gens.info; familysearch.org; ancestry.it; antenati.cultura.gov.it) where he can start looking for the geographic origin of last names by just typing them into a search bar – but as three of these sites are only in Italian, his foreign clients need his help.

On some of these websites, particularly the one run by the Culture Ministry, he finds state archives concerning birth certificates, death certificates, wedding certificates, or divorce certificates with specific dates and names, which allow him to start drawing up a family tree. 

READ ALSO: Five surprising things to know about applying for Italian citizenship via ancestry

“Obviously, the more information people give me on where their ancestors might have hailed from, the easier it is for me to find the location and narrow down the search,” he says. 

Cardile works across Italy, not just focusing on Sicily where most Italian emigrants left in the 1800-1900s. 

State archives go back until the 1860s, when the Italian kingdom was formed, and in some cases, all the way back to the Renaissance, he says. Initial research starts at around €300 then Cardile’s fee rises if he needs to travel around Italy for further investigation.

When he has unearthed specific information on the probable origins of a family, he makes a trip to the local parishes, churches and graveyards which in a pre-unified Italy were the only places where birth and other family-related certificates could be found. This is where he may discover the original names of ancestors, who they were, when they got married, if they had children and who these could be, so he can more precisely define the family tree. 

READ ALSO:  What a law from 1912 means for your claim for Italian citizenship via ancestry

“When you get to digging into centuries-old religious documents, the hard part about dealing with churches and parishes is you need to interface with the priest or the chief of the local parish community, jump through hoops and tons of bureaucracy to get their permission to lay your hands on, and analyse, old documents”. 

“Then, most of these documents are written in Latin, so you either need the priest as translator, or to know Latin yourself”. 

After so many years of ancestry investigations Cardile has learned to read it and continues to hone his Latin language skills.

Find out more about putting together an application for Italian citizenship via ancestry in The Local’s Italian citizenship section.

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