Moving to Italy. Or not.

[wtg]

When Kellen Matwick, his wife Jacqueline and their two children boarded a one-way flight to Italy in August 2024, they toasted their new life.

Matwick, whose great-grandparents emigrated from central Italy to Pennsylvania, is part of the vast Italian diaspora.

He’s also one of the millions who saw his hopes dashed when the Italian government changed its laws around citizenship by descent a year ago, on March 28, 2025 — a move that was reinforced this month when Italy’s constitutional court gave notice that it would reject the first legal argument against the law.

When it introduced the law by emergency decree, the government cited the spiraling numbers of citizens by descent who had never lived in Italy.

But for Matwick, the new law — introduced without warning in March 2025 — hasn’t just dashed his hopes for the future. It has also torpedoed his day-to-day life.

He is one of many members of the diaspora who had moved to Italy to begin the process of reclaiming their citizenship — only to have the rules change before the paperwork was completed.

And with no grace period for those who were already in the country working through initial steps of the process that culminates in an official recognition of citizenship, he has found himself in limbo in Italy — unable to apply for jobs, travel, or access healthcare as he waits for his legal situation to be resolved.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/28/travel/italian-citizenship-stuck-in-italy

[Mik]

That's interesting. Nobody's Sock just moved to Sardinia. I wonder if this affects him.

[Daniel]

Well, that sucks.

BTW, it was a court in the constitutional court (there are about 800 judges) who broke the law (they can judge based on law, they have no basis in law for upholding or overturning an appeal verdict based on the initial trial's findings of fact- as you can see, it's a three tier process) when they overturned the appeal verdict upholding the initial trial's verdict finding of Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend guilty of rape and murder.

The boyfriend's family were mafia from Bari, Montreal, and occasionally the Dominican Republic. The court at the constitutional court in this case was controlled by the mafias from the South aligned with the late Prime Minister Berlusconi. In fact, Berlusconi arranged for his office space to be occupied by the defendants' defense attorney.

The Knox family (the father) hired a now defunct PR company in Seattle (who also worked for Boeing). It might or might not sound hard to believe but the PR company handed talking points American media outlets. The American media outlets repeated them. This is how the myth of Amanda Knox as a victim of the Italian judicial system was born.

A hard look at the evidence and readings of the professionally translated initial trial's transcripts and judges' written verdict (and the same for the appeal) reveal it was an open and shut case.

Italy fascinates me (everything about it) but I'm too "Northern European" to have an ability to assimilate. This is academic because I have no way to become a citizen in the first place.