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…