Law 74/2025 explained, and why you keep seeing three different dates
Law 74/2025 inserted a new article, 3-bis, into Italy's citizenship law, and that article treats a person born abroad who holds another citizenship as never having acquired Italian citizenship unless one of four written conditions applies. The three dates you keep meeting are not contradictory reporting: 28 March 2025 is the decree, 27 March 2025 at 23:59 Rome time is the cutoff written inside it, and 24 May 2025 is when the converted law came into force.
Getting those three apart is most of the work, because the only one that decides an individual case is the middle one.
27 March 2025, 23:59 Rome time
The cutoff written into article 3-bis. Applications, confirmed appointments and court filings that exist at that instant are judged under the pre-reform rules. This is the date that decides cases.
28 March 2025
Decree-Law 36 of 2025, the emergency decree that carried the new rule. In Italy a decree-law takes effect immediately and then has sixty days to be converted by Parliament or it lapses. Pages that say "the law came into force on 27 or 28 March" are describing this step.
23 and 24 May 2025
Law 74 of 23 May 2025 converted the decree with amendments, in force 24 May 2025. This is the text that now governs, and it is why the reform is normally called Law 74/2025 rather than Decree 36/2025. Some of the conditions in the final text, including the confirmed-appointment condition, were added at this stage.
What the article actually says
Article 3-bis opens by setting itself against a long list of older provisions, including articles 1, 2, 3, 14 and 20 of Law 91/1992 and articles 1, 2, 7, 10, 12 and 19 of Law 555/1912. Against all of them, it declares that a person born abroad, even before the article came into force, who holds another citizenship, is deemed never to have acquired Italian citizenship. Then it lists the exceptions.
- (a) a complete application filed with a consulate or comune by the cutoff.
- (a-bis) an application filed on the day of an appointment the office had communicated by the cutoff.
- (b) a court claim filed by the cutoff.
- (c) a parent or grandparent who holds, or held at death, exclusively Italian citizenship.
- (d) a parent who resided in Italy at least two continuous years after acquiring citizenship and before the birth or adoption.
What the reform did not change
- The old mechanics of transmission still run inside the surviving gates. Passing (c) does not excuse a break further down the chain.
- Citizenship by descent still exists. Parent and grandparent lines that meet the exclusivity test are recognised as before.
- Cases filed before the cutoff are untouched, and the courts have since confirmed this repeatedly.
- Naturalisation by residence, marriage routes and the rules for people living in Italy sit outside article 3-bis entirely.
What happened after the law, in order
Each of those has its own page in this set. The sequence matters: the law of 2025 is now read through four court decisions and two circulars.
- Decree-Law 36 of 28 March 2025, converted with amendments by Law 74 of 23 May 2025, in force 24 May 2025, inserting article 3-bis into Law 91 of 5 February 1992.
- Interior Ministry circular of 28 May 2025.
- Constitutional Court, judgment 63/2026, deposited 30 April 2026, on the Turin referrals against article 3-bis.
- Constitutional Court, order 147/2026, deposited 23 July 2026, referring the retroactivity question to the EU Court of Justice.
- Court of Cassation, Joint Sections, judgment 24045/2026, deliberated 14 April 2026, deposited 26 July 2026.
- Interior Ministry circular prot. 65050 of 10 August 2026.
One next step
Once the three dates are separate in your head, the question becomes narrow: which of the five conditions could your family reach. Our free check asks that in order and will tell you when the answer is none of them.
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