Did your ancestor come from Livorno, Pisa or elsewhere in Tuscany? We find and retrieve the Italian records you need for an application for Italian citizenship by descent (iure sanguinis), and we check that every link in the chain holds before you spend time and money on the application.

First things first: the 2025 reform

The rules changed radically in 2025. Law 74/2025 added article 3-bis to the Italian citizenship law (91/1992): people born abroad who hold another citizenship are now considered never to have acquired Italian citizenship, unless one of these conditions applies:

• You applied before 28 March 2025. An application, a consular appointment or a court case filed by 11:59 pm on 27 March 2025 keeps the old rules, with no limit on generations.
• A parent or grandparent holds (or held at death) only Italian citizenship.
• A parent lived legally in Italy for at least two continuous years after becoming a citizen and before your birth.

In practice, if your Italian ancestor is a great-grandparent or further back, recognition by descent alone is usually no longer possible. Other routes remain open: a shorter residence period (two years instead of three) for foreigners with an Italian-born parent or grandparent, and court cases in Italy for maternal lines before 1948, when women could not pass on citizenship. The reform has been upheld by the Italian Constitutional Court (judgment 63/2026), but its compatibility with EU law is now before the Court of Justice of the European Union, so the situation may still change.

We are genealogists, not lawyers: this summary is not legal advice. Always check your own case with the consulate or with a lawyer specialised in citizenship before collecting documents.

What we do

• We identify the exact town of birth. “Livorno” or “Pisa” on a ship list or a naturalisation paper may mean the province or the port of departure, not the town. We start from the documents of the country of arrival and work back to the right comune.
• We find every Italian record in the chain: births, marriages and deaths in Italian civil registration (from 1866 in Tuscany), in the earlier Tuscan civil registers kept in the State Archives, and in parish registers.
• We request the certified full copies (copia integrale) from the town halls, with the correct legal motivation that Italian offices now require.
• For ancestors born before Italian unification, when no Italian office can certify a birth, we obtain the baptism certificate from the diocese, signed and stamped.
• We check the chain. Name variants (Pietro, Pedro, Peter), misspelt surnames, dates that do not match, and above all the date of any naturalisation: if the emigrant became a foreign citizen before the next child in the line was born, transmission stops.
• We deliver a clear report with the family chain, the records found and copies of the documents, ready for you, your consulate or your lawyer.

Our service covers research and the retrieval of records. Apostilles, translations and the filing of the application are not included and can be quoted separately.

Why work with us

We have been researching families in Livorno and Tuscany since 1999, professionally since 2011. We have photographed and indexed many parish registers of Livorno, we work regularly in the State Archives of Livorno and Pisa and in the diocesan archives, and our databases link more than 160,000 people. We write to you in English, Italian or French.

How it works

1. Tell us what you know: names, approximate dates, places, and any documents from the country of arrival.
2. We send a free, personalised quote listing the records to find, the archives to consult and the expected timescale.
3. We do the research and keep you updated as each record is found. Most searches take a few weeks at most.
4. You receive the report and the certified copies to take to your consulate or lawyer.

An example

Names and dates are invented; the steps and the problems are real. Lucia, born in Buenos Aires, descends from her great-grandfather Pietro, a porter born in Livorno in 1885 who emigrated to Argentina in 1906. The family only knew that he “came from Livorno”. His 1925 Argentine marriage record gave his father’s name and his home town; the ship list confirmed age and origin. In Livorno his birth record was found under the name “Pietro Lorenzo”: in Argentina he was “Pedro”. Pietro became an Argentine citizen in 1934, six years after the birth of his son, so the chain held. Because the family had booked a consular appointment in 2024, before the March 2025 deadline, the application could go ahead under the old rules.

Ready to start?

Write to us with what you know about your Tuscan ancestor. We will tell you honestly which records exist, what we can find and how long it will take.