A common mistake with Italian citizenship applications.

First things first: start by requesting your Italian ancestor’s birth certificate

How to Get Your Italian Ancestor’s Birth Certificate

If you are interested in applying for Italian citizenship by descent, you will need to collect a number of documents from Italy, including your ancestor’s birth certificate. This is the most important document, as you cannot apply for citizenship without it. Therefore, the first document you need to request is your Italian-born ancestor’s birth certificate from his/her Italian comune (municipality) of birth.

In order to do this, you need his/her name at birth and, although you do not need to be 100% certain of the exact name, the more accurate your information is the better. You then need to identify the comune (municipality) where your ancestor was born and find out his/her date of birth. You can do this by searching through family records, or online genealogy resources. Once you have this information, you are ready to request a copy of your ancestor’s birth certificate.

As the request must be made in Italian, and you need to know how to request it and the exact format (there are different ones) of the birth certificate you need for your application, please consider requesting the most important document for your Italian citizenship application with our help.

Please send an email to citizenship@vademecumitalia.com with the following information regarding your Italian-born ancestor: your ancestor’s full name, date and place of birth and we will send you a quote for requesting the certificate on your behalf.

In some cases, the comune will charge a fee for searching for the birth certificate in their archives, and the processing time can vary. In fact, in some cases, it can take several weeks or even months to receive the certificate, because according to the law they have six months to answer this kind of request, but we usually receive a first reply fairly quickly.

It is important to note that you cannot apply for Italian citizenship without your ancestor’s birth certificate. So, if you are serious about applying for citizenship, the first thing you should do is request this document.

A Word of Caution

We have had a number of clients contact us after they have collected most or even all of the other foreign documents required for the Italian citizenship application, only to realize that they did not have their Italian ancestor’s birth certificate. This is a common mistake as in many cases after the clients have spent a lot of money on other documents, translations, apostilles, etc, they discover that they can’t find their Italian ancestor’s birth certificate and so they are stuck and cannot move forward with their application. It is essential that you have the birth certificate of your Italian ancestor before you begin the application process.

So, if you are thinking about applying for Italian citizenship by descent, be wise and don’t make this common mistake. Start by requesting your ancestor’s birth certificate today!