Jessica Amato, a 30-year-old anthropology professor from San Francisco, has a name for born-and-bred Americans of Italian ancestry who apply for Italian citizenship: "sleeper citizens."
"With this Italian citizenship, you've had it your whole life, so you're just applying for activation," says Amato, who is eligible even though both her parents and her grandparents were born in the United States.
Italian law allows foreigners of Italian descent to claim citizenship, even if they have to go back four generations to link to an ancestor who was born in Italy.
The concept of applying for citizenship that is technically already yours, called
jure sanguinis
(Latin for "by right of blood"), isn't unique to Italy, of course. But what distinguishes Italy from other European countries is that others don't recognize the so-called blood right in the progeny of emigres more than two generations down the line.
That means that if you're an American who wants Italian citizenship, you can reach back to your great-great grandfather and make it happen - at least in theory.
The Italian government doesn't make it easy to apply - it takes an average of three years and costs about $1,000 - but thousands of Americans are doing it, despite the bureaucratic tangle involved.
(If you have any doubts about just how tangled the process can be, consider the fact that the Italian Embassy wouldn't even respond to requests for information on how many Americans have become Italian citizens. Calls to consulates around the country went unanswered.)
Dual Italian citizenship connects Americans to more than their heritage. They can freely work, retire, invest or get health care in any of the 27 member states of the European Union.
The appeal of Italian citizenship comes "from the economic standpoint of somebody that is doing well," said Giuseppina Spillane, who fields citizenship queries as a program director at the National Italian-American Foundation.
Spillane compared the attitudes of North Americans with that of South Americans who fled to Northern Italy following Argentina's economic meltdown in the early 2000s.
"Argentineans were really in need of basic necessities and some sort of help by the government," she said. Americans, by contrast, have the attitude, "I can invest by buying property over there, retire over there. I can go to school there, get a master's."
Dona DeSanctis, executive editor of Italian America magazine, said she's seen "many more" applications during the last five years. Spillane confirmed that assessment, saying Italian citizenship was now "very much in demand," and that consulates and the Ministry of Interior were "very overwhelmed" with applications.
So overwhelmed, apparently, that the Chicago consulate has stopped accepting them until 2009, according to a recorded voice-mail message.
If you don't enjoy the sound of recorded messages, there's help. Donald McLean, owner of Myitaliancitizenship.com, a six-year-old company based in Nova Scotia that helps citizens-to-be gather documents, said 100 new customers a month sign up for $55 document searches.
McLean said he didn't know why
jure sanguinis
citizenship has become so popular. "It's a curiosity why so many Americans are getting it," he said, suggesting it might have to do with increased Internet usage.
Anthony Tamburri, dean of the John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute at Queens College in New York City, said he wasn't sure, either, though he believed that awareness of citizenship eligibility increased in the run-up to the 2006 Italian general elections.
The Silvio Berlusconi government "fought hard for Italians living abroad to vote," at least in part, Tamburri said, because of the perceived conservative leanings of the Italian American population. (The first mail-in ballots in the country's history didn't win Berlusconi the election, however; his party, Forza Italia, narrowly lost to Romano Prodi's party.)
The uptick in applications also matches a surge in Italian ethnic pride in the United States, said DeSanctis, of Italian America Magazine.
"Italians always aimed to blend in because they were a despised minority," she said. Yet between the 1990 and 2000 censuses, the number of people who identified as being of Italian descent increased by more than four million.
"What that indicates is a greater ethnic awareness," said DeSanctis, pointing to the worldwide "balkanization of ethnicity" as a cause.
Italian Americans often "don't speak Italian. They've only been to Italy on vacation. But they want to identify with their Italian roots," she said, adding that dual citizenship is one way to do that.
For Nick Iovacchini, 28, the owner of a sports-apparel company in Hoboken, N.J., becoming an Italian citizen gave him the chance to play baseball overseas.
Iovacchini was a junior at Rice University in Houston, playing shortstop and second base for the school team, when an Italian team recruited him in 2002. The Bollate, from a province on the outskirts of Milan, were allowed only so many foreign players. Iovacchini, as an Italian citizen, wouldn't count.
"They said, 'The key to you doing this is getting your Italian citizenship," he said. "I wasn't the world's greatest player, so it's not like I had a big, bright professional career here in the States in front of me."
He and his father, Eric Iovacchini, a lawyer who has since founded Bella Consultants in Asheville, N.C., to help people with their own applications, soon realized what dual citizenship could mean for their family beyond "the baseball side of things."
With global perceptions of U.S. hegemony at an all-time low, having European citizenship is a definite plus.
"It's so practical," said McLean. "It opens up a whole section of the world."
"You never know when you're going to want to pull out a European passport," said Iovacchini, who always travels with both passports. One time, he landed at an airport in South America where there was a long customs line for Americans, who had to pay $90 to enter the country.
There was a second line for Europeans. And they got to walk through for free.