Italian passport refused: birth not in ANPR
A person goes to the consulate to renew an Italian passport issued twenty years earlier and is told that, according to the registers, they are not an Italian citizen. The passport was issued, the family is Italian, the grandparents came from Naples or Frosinone, and yet the office cannot renew it. The reason is not a change of mind about the citizenship. It is a missing record. The birth was never transcribed in an Italian comune, or the AIRE registration was never made, and since the national population register became the only source the consulates consult, a person who is not in it cannot be served.
What the ANPR is
The ANPR, Anagrafe Nazionale della Popolazione Residente, is the national population register created by article 62 of Legislative Decree 82/2005. It replaced the separate registers of the 7,903 Italian comuni with a single database, and the migration of the comuni was completed in January 2022. It holds the residents of Italy and the Italians registered in the AIRE of each comune, around six million people abroad. The consulates issue and renew passports and identity cards only to a person who appears in it.
The migration carried over the records which were active in the comuni at that moment. Records which had been archived or cancelled were not transferred, and a person who had never been entered in any register had nothing to transfer. This is why a person who holds an old Italian passport can be absent from the system today. The passport was issued on the strength of the parent’s file, or under a practice which the consulates abandoned around 2016, and the transcription of the birth which should have followed never happened.
The four situations we see most
- Born in Britain to Italian parents, never transcribed. The child was Italian from birth, obtained a passport as a minor on the parent’s application, and nobody sent the birth certificate to the comune. The adult is invisible to the ANPR.
- Recognised by descent years ago, transcription never completed. The consulate recognised the citizenship, the applicant received a passport, and the transcription of the birth in the comune of the ancestor was never confirmed or was never requested.
- Cancelled as untraceable. A person left Italy without registering in the AIRE, or registered and then moved without telling the consulate. The comune cancelled the record for irreperibilità, and the cancellation was not migrated.
- Registered, but with a discrepancy. The name, the date or the place of birth in the comune differs from the British passport, after a transcription made from a document with an error, and the consulate cannot match the person to the record.
A man born in Brighton in 1979 to a mother from Naples who never applied for British citizenship. He held an Italian passport issued in London in 1998, as a student, on his mother’s file. In 2025 he applied to renew it and was refused: his birth had never been transcribed in Naples and he had never been registered in the AIRE in his own name. The remedy was the transcription of his British birth certificate, in long form, with the apostille and the translation, sent by post to the Births Section of the consulate, followed by the AIRE registration through FAST IT once the comune had confirmed, and then the passport. The whole sequence took seven months, most of it waiting for the comune.
How the record is put right
The order of the steps cannot be changed, because each office acts only on the previous record.
- Establish the comune. For a person born abroad it is the comune where the Italian parent or the recognised ancestor is registered, and a search in the family’s documents, or in the comune’s records, is sometimes needed to find it.
- Transcribe the birth. The British birth certificate in long form, with the paper apostille of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the official translation, is sent to the consulate, which transmits it to the comune. For an adult the file is the same as for a child, with the addition of any marriage to be transcribed and the proof of the parent’s citizenship.
- Register in the AIRE. Once the comune confirms the transcription, the registration is requested through the FAST IT portal, with the passport or the identity document and the proof of the address in the district.
- Obtain the codice fiscale, where the person never had one. The comune cannot align a record in the ANPR without it, and for a resident abroad it is attributed through the consulate.
- Apply for the passport, through the consulate’s booking system, once the person appears in the ANPR.
A person cancelled as untraceable follows a different route: the comune is asked to revoke the cancellation and to transfer the record to the AIRE, with the proof of the residence abroad and of the dates. A discrepancy in the record is corrected by the comune on the basis of the original certificates, and the correction must be made before the passport, not after, because the passport is issued in the name recorded in the ANPR.
What the law requires of an Italian abroad
Law 470/1988 obliges every Italian citizen who moves abroad for more than twelve months, and every Italian born abroad, to register in the AIRE through the consulate of the district, within ninety days of the move. Presidential Decree 396/2000 requires the acts of civil status formed abroad to be transmitted to the comune for transcription. The consulates’ practice since 2016 enforces both: no passport without transcription and AIRE. Since 1 January 2024 the comune can impose a penalty of 200 to 1,000 euro for each year of omitted AIRE registration, for a maximum of five years, under article 1, paragraph 242, of Law 213/2023.
The record can be created at any age, and for a person who was recognised in the past the omission concerns the record only. Where the consulate issued a passport years ago, its own file documents a recognition made under the law then in force, and the transcription completes it. The reform of 2025 matters for the person for whom nothing was ever filed. Article 3-bis applies to everyone born abroad who holds another citizenship and whose citizenship was never recognised, whatever their age, and the late transcription of an adult’s birth is examined today under its conditions: a parent or a grandparent who held exclusively Italian citizenship at the birth, a parent who lived in Italy for two years as a citizen before the birth, or an application lodged by 27 March 2025. The page on citizenship by descent explains them.
If your passport renewal was refused, send us the letter or the email of the consulate, your old passport and the documents of the Italian parent. We tell you which of the situations above is yours and what the file to the comune must contain.