Over the past decade, the province of Verona has faced an exponential increase of 1.200% in applications for Italian citizenship. This phenomenon has directly impacted the municipal civil registry and marital status offices, which are overwhelmed by the growing number of requests.
To cope with the intense workload, cities are modifying their regulations, extending the deadline for completing the administrative process of obtaining Italian citizenship to the legal limit, that is, to 180 days.
“The deadlines necessary to track and recover all the documentation of Italians who once left our region, together with the number of requests we receive daily from abroad, led us to extend the bureaucratic deadlines necessary to complete these procedures”, explained the mayor of Belfiore, Alessio Albertini, to the newspaper Arena.
The municipality, with around 2.610 inhabitants, for example, took measures to deal with the intense volume of work, which has been causing significant congestion in routine activities.
“As a provincial councilor, I brought the problem to the president of the Province, Flavio Pasini, and also presented it to the mayor of Verona, Donato Cafagna. The volume of work is overwhelming our offices to grant our citizenship, increasingly desired outside Italy,” Albertini said.
Furthermore, there is a particularity of this phenomenon, according to him: “We have many citizens who are abroad, are registered in our electoral registers, but will never come to vote in Belfiore. However, more and more people are being registered on the electoral register.”
This upward trend in applications for Italian citizenship reflects a growing desire among descendants of Italians to reconnect with their roots and gain access to the benefits and rights offered by Italian citizenship.
The province of Verona, which encompasses 98 cities, stands out as one of the regions where this movement has been most evident, and authorities are adapting to meet this growing demand.
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