If you want to live in Italy legally and you are from outside of the European Union, like me, you too will have to do this.

Many Americans live here for years, illegally.  I have recently met bunches of them.  One man has been here for 40 years, has been happily employed as a cook for all this time, gets paid in cash, and apparently a fair amount because he lives in a gorgeous piazza.  He said that once or twice, in all this time, he has been asked by someone in authority what he is doing in Rome, he says he is “writing a book about Italian food” and everyone starts shouting about which region has the best this or that…or their mothers.

The easy part is getting your visa from the Italian consulate in the States.  Easy, that is, as long as you are extremely rich and do not need to work, and can prove it, or your American employer is sending you over there for work, or you are a student.  If you are not married to an Italian, don’t have a trust fund and actually need to work, or are not enrolled in a university, heaven help you if you want to move there legally.  That’s a whole other post.  Anyway, once you’ve got it, you can go to Italy.

But, wait, you’re not done yet!

Within eight days of your arrival, you have to go to the post office, yes the post office, to pick up a “kit” for your permesso di soggiorno – permit of stay (hereinafter “permesso”).  The first time I went to pick it up, the lady there said that the kits are only distributed before noon, even though I found out later it’s just a small notebook, the post office has stacks of them, and when I arrived at 12:30 there were a bunch of workers standing around.  I’m pretty sure one of them could have reached down and handed me one.  Anyway, fortunately, when I returned the next day before noon, the post office was open and kits were available. With the kit finally in hand, I do not know what I would have done if I did not speak fluent Italian.  There were no instructions in English or any other common language

I filled it out, I took it back.  Even though apparently a few months ago, the fee to drop off the kit was something like 60 euros, it had now jumped to 130 euros.  When prices increase here, they often double.  I paid, dropped off the kit and accompanying documents, and was immediately given an appointment a month and a half later in part of Rome that does not exist on anyone’s tourist map.  That appointment was for the sole purpose of taking my fingerprints at a police station.

Six weeks passed.  The fingerprinting day approached.  I went get passport photos taken, which were required.  There is no CVS or Wallgreen’s or Kinko’s here to take passport photos.  Rather, one must go to an old-timey photo booth that one can still find in every subway stop.  It cost 5 euros, which is a total rip-off, and then when I put in a ten euro note, it did not give me change.  Spending money unnecessarily makes me crazy; getting robbed by that machine put me in a funk all the way to the police station.

An hour later, after two subways and a long bus ride and a little walk, I arrived at the middle-of-nowhere police station to which I had been dispatched. I believe it is where every foreigner must go, no matter the reason he or she is in Italy. My appointment was at 1:00. I arrived at 12:50.

The walk up to the immigration office/police station. Sorry, but a lot of Rome looks like this.

Here is what I saw: A long “line” of people behind a barricade stretched out for many meters.  It was hardly single file; it looked more like a giant palm leaf.  To the right of the “line” was a kind of holding area with chairs. It was all outdoors but there was, thank goodness, a giant tent for shade. I asked the police officer who was guarding everything if the line was for people with 1:00 appointments.  He said the line was for people with noon appointments.  I have said it before and I will say it again, I do not know what people do in these situations if they do not speak Italian.

Oh, the humanity.

Everyone who had come for appointments later than noon were sent to the holding area. I sat down. I had had the forethought to bring a book, which must mean I am used to wildly long delays.  All of a sudden, the police officer let all the noon people through, and he turned to the waiting area and called for anyone with a “1:00 or 1:30 appointment” to take their places.  So, there ended up being no difference between having a 1:00 or 1:30 appointment.  We were now equalized in the same line.

We would stand there for an hour.  This poor guy was in front of me:

I know, dude.

We were equalized in more ways than one.  I am an American attorney.  Many of these folks were migrant workers from places like Sri Lanka and Moldovia.  We all had to stand in that hot hellhole, and we all had to wait. When some girl from who knows where tried to cut in front of me, I said “What do you think you are doing? We’re all going in at the same time.”  I was really assertive about it; I must be becoming Italian.  But she’s becoming even more Italian than I am, because she tried to cut the line in the first place.

A Chinese woman in a very pretty dress was struggling to communicate with the policeman tasked with wrangling us.  Apparently she had gone to a post office, dropped off her kit, paid the small fortune required, and the post office person, rather than give her an appointment, just told her to go down to this here police station at her leisure. The policeman was telling her that it didn’t work that way.  He said that “by law” the postal worker had to print out an appointment card for her at the moment she dropped off her kit, which was a true statement.  The postal worker had apparently not done so, so the woman just came.  She started crying.  She had taken a day off of work, her children were at home, taken a hundred buses or something, all for nothing.  Couldn’t he please just let her in the line and take her fingerprints?  She begged in broken Italian, but I was so proud of her for doing so and making her point.  The policeman said, no, it didn’t work that way.  They wouldn’t be able to locate her kit even if she went inside.  He told her to go back to the post office and have them give her an appointment, which by this time would be closer to Christmas “if not afterwards.  We close for several weeks at Christmas.”  The lady sat down in the waiting area, arms crossed, huffing and crying softly.  I don’t know what she thought she could accomplish by just sitting there.  I also don’t know what became of her.  I felt awfully sorry for that poor lady.

Then, something extraordinary happened. I met one of the coolest, most interesting people in the world.  She was a seventy-year old Italian lady named Mariantoinetta, with a dyed red ponytail and whiskers all over her face.  She wore jeans and sneakers and some kind of flowing batik shirt. She was accompanying a young man from southwest Asia; I never asked her what their relationship was.  I first heard her smoker’s voice behind me telling everyone in earshot that she was going to “have a nice cigarette” while we waited.  Then, someone asked her if she were Italian. “NO!” she insisted. “I’m Roman!” I liked her immediately.

Then, she turned to me and told me I did the right thing by not letting that other girl cut in line. We had a laugh about it.  She asked where I was from. “Ah, the United States?  What’s it like there,” she asked.

“In what way,” I asked her.

“In every way. How expensive is it?”

“Well, it depends.  It depends if you’re in New York, for example, or in Texas.  I mean, you can get breakfast just about anywhere for four dollars.”

“Four dollars? At that point I’ll just bring my coffee machine from Italy and make breakfast myself.”

It was off to a great start. We talked for a long time about America. She wanted to know who I thought would win the presidential election. When I told her who I was certain would win, she said, “Good, I like him.” Mariantoinetta loves to travel. She travels often, to places like Cambodia and Vietnam. She has never been to the States but would like to. She wants to go there for several months and she asked if I knew of any English lessons she could take, anywhere in the country.  She narrowed her eyes at me and said, “New York must be seen. Brooklyn must be seen. They are, themselves, works of art.”  She almost always travels alone, because she says she has “no affectionate ties.”  In August, however, *she* was “adopted” by a stray cat whom she cannot now abandon for a holiday.

We were finally, all at once, both 1:00 and 1:30 appointment holders, allowed in the police station.  I went through a metal detector, was told I had to leave my helmet on the floor where a bunch of uniformed 18-year-olds were standing around doing nothing, and I marched up four flights of stairs.

I then checked in with a lady, who had in front of her a stack of permesso kits.  Picture it: a lady at a table with all of our kits in a stack, containing our most personal information, as if she were distributing brochures at a conference.  I told her my name, she thumbed through the stack, found the kit I had dropped off at the post office two months earlier, and she told me to take a seat in the room behind her.

Naturally, I thought I could just take any empty seat. It was a large, circular room with chairs lined against the walls. A couple of young military guys with pimples barked at me to take the first empty seat next to the last occupied seat. The person in line behind me then took the next empty seat at my side. What it was, was a giant game of musical chairs. The line wasn’t a line but a circle. When someone got to the “end” of the circle and went into the fingerprint room, every person had to stand up and shift over one seat.  This happened about every sixty seconds for an hour.

I will sit in every one of these chairs in the next hour.

At least I was next to Mariantoinetta. She told me about her engagement decades ago. A month before her wedding, she had to go to the emergency room and fell in love at first sight with her doctor. She never saw the doctor again but she knew that if she could fall in love at first sight with someone else, she shouldn’t get married. She never did get married. We talked a little about my love life and a lot about Rome. She told me the names of the streets where her mother and grandmother were born – to show me just how Roman she was. “Precisely Via Cola di Rienzo!  And Via del Tritone!” She told me her father used to buy fresh fish on the street where I now live. She loves Rome.

She also said that Rome, unlike other big Italian cities to the North, is made up of distinct neighborhoods that are very different but are harmonized next to, and inside and around, each other.  “Like those stacking Russian dolls,” she said. “Everybody tolerates each other and no one judges you for being eccentric.”

However, she wants to leave Italy. She said she is seventy, so she can’t risk losing her life savings, but she’d like to sell her place in Rome and go live in a house in Asia (“I love their philosophy,” she said) or Costa Rica. She said that Italian taxes and giant fees for everything are eating away at her savings and she cannot afford basic things. She also said to me, “Know that if you stay here, fifty percent of your time will be taken up by bureaucracy, waiting in lines, getting moved around. The other fifty percent will be for everything else in life, your family, your job, everything else you must squeeze into the fifty percent that you are not waiting in lines in government buildings.” Advice? Or a curse?

I got to the last chair in the circle, then was called into a room.  There were about ten uniformed people, but not police officers, sitting at fingerprinting stations in a white room that reminded me of the giant TV room in the Willy Wonka movie. They all had immigrants in front of them, trying to overcome language barriers by screaming. I sat down with one man, who immediately started flirting mercilessly including asking if I had a boyfriend, and if so, whether he were ugly. Mariantoinetta came in after me with her friend, and we said “Ciao,” and then the man taking my fingerprints made a genuinely funny joke: “See? That’s why we make you wait in line for so long, so you’ll make friends!”  I responded, “I get it, it’s a psychological experiment.” Somehow the whole room heard me and everyone guffawed.

Fingerprints done!  “Now what happens,” I asked. The man joked that he was going to personally deliver my permesso to my house and to get ready.  We laughed.  No, he said, in forty days, I must go to a different post office than the one I had gone to before, and “check and see” if the permesso is ready.  Do I have to go in person? Yes. No guarantee it will be ready then? Correct.

When that happens, it will be my fourth day devoted to getting this document that, I insist, could have been procured via mail.  In fact, the fingerprints – why weren’t they taken at the time I dropped off the paperwork at the post office back in September?  If the answer is, “because the post office cannot take fingerprints,” then I say either: “If they can accept the permesso kits they can take fingerprints” OR “Then we should drop off the kits at the police station and do them at the same time there.”  Then, they should mail us the permesso, just like my visa was mailed back in the States.  Dear Italian government, if you’d like any more suggestions, email me at liz@lizinrome.com – I’m full of  ’em.

Mariantoinetta, her friend, and I walked out together.  She really wanted to give me a ride home. She was going in the exact opposite direction as I was and it did not make sense. We hugged goodbye, and I told her I bet I would run into her again somewhere. She narrowed her eyes and said, “I think so, too.”

The gypsy camp just steps from the Roma immigration office/police station.

The epilogue to this immigration saga is that after I said goodbye to Mariantoinetta, I trotted down the road to wait for the bus to take me to the nearest subway stop and then, home. The bus stop was on the edge of a gypsy compound. It reeked of garbage and human waste. It looked like the third world; impossible to believe this is Italy. The bus came, and a gypsy mother about my age was struggling to get on with her four children, one in a stroller. I lifted the stroller for her. She did not say thank you or acknowledge me. Then, in the bus, her two twin daughters, age about 6, attempted to spit on me for fifteen minutes straight. The mother saw this but said nothing. The children were filthy with knots in their hair, and one of the girls already had rotten teeth. I ached for them. I felt anger towards their mother, who, although living across the street from the Rome’s central immigration office, has never and will never go through the process that Mariantoinetta’s friend, the cutting-in-line girl, the sobbing Chinese lady, the sleeping-while-standing dude, and I, all took the trouble and expense to go through.