Episode Details

Luca: Hello Anna, welcome back. Welcome back everyone to the Magic Towns Italy podcast.

Anna: Hi everyone. Happy to be here again.

Luca: Anna, it’s a pleasure to have you here again after our little Thanksgiving break.

What did you do last week for Thanksgiving?

Anna: Yeah, actually nothing special. What about you?

Luca: I ate some chicken, not turkey really, but that’s a Okay. Yeah. But let’s not talk about this. I wouldn’t want to upset the vegans who are listening to the show.

So today we are having a chat about a topic that is very important to a lot of our listeners, the new work visa for Italian descendants.

Anna: Yeah, we finally got some good news for people with Italian roots. This is something the Italian diaspora has been waiting for forever.

Luca: Italy has a enormous diaspora. Countries like Argentina and Brazil have tens of millions of people with [00:01:00] Italian heritage. In the US there’s about 20 million Italian Americans. These communities we know because most of our audience is Italian American, actually. Have a strong interest in reconnecting with Italy. And one of the main interests for many has been to obtain Italian citizenship through the ancestry, but in May things got much harder.

Anna: Yeah, exactly. Back in May, 2025, Italy changed its citizenship law and putting this strict two generational limit for reclaiming citizenship by descent. So now only people with Italian parent or grandparent can automatically get recognized as Italian citizens through blood. Um, before that, there was no limit at all. So you could go back to great grandparents, or even farther you could prove the family line never broke.

Luca: I helped a lady get her citizenship, as early as two years [00:02:00] ago through her great, uh, great, great grandfather who was born in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. So that’s even before Italy even existed. And the reform from May caused a bit of a stir. Uh, we ourselves at Magic Towns ran a petition and over 600 people, um, who were cut out by the reform. Mostly Italian Americans committed to a minimum two year residency period.

In order to get Italian citizenship, but the government did not listen. A lot of Italian descendants lost their straightforward route to Italian citizenship.

Anna: Yeah, it really upset a lot of people and for a good reason. Literally overnight, thousands of people were in the middle of applying or planning to apply, just had the doors slammed in their face. It was pretty brutal for the diaspora communities.

Luca: Someone wrote to us, they had already put down a hundred [00:03:00] thousand euro on renovating a property thinking that we’ll get citizenship and then suddenly, woo, they were cut out and they didn’t have a legal way to move through it.

Anyway. That’s crazy. Talking about, yeah. Yeah. It is crazy. They’re talking about positive news. There is this new law we’re talking about. Mm-hmm. And the good news is there’s a new quota free work visa for descendants of Italian citizens from certain countries. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit what happened, Anna?

Anna: Basically on November 24, the Italian government put out this decree that creates a special work permit for people who are descendants of Italian citizens. And these permits don’t count against their normal immigration quotas.

Usually Italy caps how many work visa they give you each year the decreto flussi, which is the early immigration quota. Those fill up super, super fast. And so, this new rule says that if you’ve got Italian ancestry and you’re from one of the [00:04:00] listed country, you can get a work visa

Luca: US listeners are most often used to to the H