Lawyer Marco Mellone speaks outside Italy’s highest Court of Cassation in April, prior to the start of a hearing to argue against the new citizenship law that restricts citizenship by descent. Italy’s highest court ruled that children born with Italian citizenship do not automatically lose it when a parent later becomes a citizen of another country, a decision expected to bolster citizenship-by-descent claims by descendants of Italian emigrants worldwide. AdvertisementAt the center of the dispute was whether children automatically lose Italian citizenship when an Italian parent acquires a foreign nationality while the children are minors. AdvertisementThe court clarified that children born in countries that automatically grant citizenship at birth — including the United States — retain their Italian citizenship even if their parents naturalize there. Mellone estimated that several hundred thousand families may have been affected by the restrictive interpretation adopted in recent years.