drcalm wrote:Thanks.
We do not have children yet.
I prefer doing it asap since we are living in the UK and I don't have EU passport (submitting now to EU card, but it takes months to complete, I prefer to try and acquire citizenship).
Getting the British residence card is a child play compared with the Italian citizenship.
The first hurdle is the AIRE. This is a database of Italian citizens living abroad, the Italian government uses it for various tasks, i.e. to ask you tax you may owe them, and if your wife is not registered to the AIRE, it will take them 1 year (if you are lucky, last time it took them 3 years to change my address in the UK!) to register her, and until she is not registered they will not accept your application, no matter what (so if she is not, and you plan to ask the Italian citizenship, invite her to register, if you are lucky they may complete that process in the next 2 years).
The second hurdle is that you need 3 years of marriage, they will not care a jota if you have been partners for half a century before your actual marriage. I wouldn't be surprised for them to insist the 3 years starts from the moment you actually registered your wedding with them (they wouldn't be right, but they wouldn't care).
Once you have done that, the first thing they will ask you to deal with you in London is proof that you are lawfully residing in the UK, that's it your residence permit. I truly doubt they will give you an appointment, only Mondays and Tuesdays by the way, if you don't lawfully reside in UK, and even if you contrive to get one, I doubt they will not throw you out of the Consulate if you don't produce the resident permit.
So let's say that you have got your resident permit and your appointment, what will you bring with you at this appointment? Well, I can tell you it costed me £2200 to cobble together all the original, notarised, legalised, translated, apostilled paper works they asked me for my wife. It also took me 1 month, so I advise you to prepare the paperwork before the appointment, but make sure they give you an appointment that will not invalidate your paperwork (they will generally disdain to touch documents older than 6 months). Ah, they will also ask you to pay £200 for the application itself.
Once you get your appointment, and you waste your day doing your application with a clerk who will do their outmost to find reasons not to accept it, they will send away without a receipt. It will take months of chasing to get from them the code you will need to follow your application (actually, it took me more than 15 months). Once you got your hand of that code, you will discover that in Rome, they haven't even started to look at your application. If you are extremely lucky, your citizenship will be granted in 3 years, but it will not be valid until the oath, which will take place in the consulate 8-10 months afterwards, if you keep chasing them. You will then become Italian citizen, the next day after the oath, but you will not get a passport or an identity card for the next 4-6 months, as they have to send your paperwork to the Italian municipality database (AIRE) where your wife is registered.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could become British citizen well before the end of the above process (that's what actually happened to my wife).
Anyway, as a spouse of an Italian citizen you should be aware you are treated much better than foreigners who may try to naturalise using other avenues. In example, if they don't refuse your application after 720 days, they cannot refuse anymore, and you may pay a lawyer to force a judge to speed up the process (i.e. 2 years and half instead of 3 years). Others don't get this right, so if you are trying to naturalise because you have lawfully resided in Italy paying your taxes for 10 years, they will usually take 5 to 6 years to give you an answer, and there are a few cases, mostly Palestinians living in Italy before 1984, where they may well be wait forever for such an answer.
