Utopia: An Italian Study
Utopia: An Italian Study
Another Straw For The Camel's Back - Intro & Context
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Another Straw For The Camel's Back - Intro & Context

An excruciating account of Italian bureaucracy

Italian bureaucracy is a long running joke. In fact, I think one of the first chain e-mails to crawl its miserable way through the trenches of the early internet was probably the following:

“In heaven: The chefs are French, the police are English, the lovers are Italian, the mechanics are German, and the whole place is run by the Swiss.

“In hell: The chefs are English, the police are German, the lovers are Swiss, the mechanics are French, and the whole place is run by the Italians.”

Hah hah.

It stops being quite so funny when you experience the bureaucracy day in and day out, but I think the worst part of it all is just how difficult it is to convey the myriad challenges of living in Italy to anyone who doesn’t live in Italy without sounding overly dramatic. And the thing is, we’re a social species; we like to share our troubles with our nearest and dearest. 

But the unfortunate fact is that every time I’ve tried to explain to friends or family outside of Italy just why getting something as simple as getting an ID card could reduce me to tears, I fall flat in conveying the magnitude and complexity of the issues involved. You see, most incidents are small, isolated ones. Not something you’d necessarily want to complain about in and of itself. But those things compound over time, and that’s how you end up crying hysterically on the phone to your sister after a post office worker tells you to come back tomorrow.

The best analogy that I can come up with that Italian bureaucracy is like a labyrinth whose master cultivator died thirty years ago and left no instructions. It was originally designed to be challenging anyway, but years of neglect, overgrowth, and random acts of vandalism by local hoodlums have ensured that not only is there no clear path to any place you want to go, but whatever path someone else took is not guaranteed to work out for you in quite the same way. This leads to a constant stream of minor frustrations that, when added up, become absolutely overwhelming.

I’ve long wanted to write something to attempt to capture the sheer insanity that is Italian bureaucracy— I’ve toyed with detailing our residency process, where the police officer let us get away with a technicality because he liked our neighbor’s taste in music, or Adam’s ten month journey to get his carta di soggiorno (basically an Italian green card) which included a surprise three hour wait at the immigration center because on the very day of our long-awaited appointment “they”- whoever “they” is, the mysterious “they”- decided to reinstate an old fee that could only be paid at the post office. Because why not.

I’m sure I’ll get to those stories eventually, because in hindsight they are hilarious, but in this mini series I wanted to do something a little different. I want to give you, dear listeners, the opportunity to relive with me, step by step, my journey to accomplish one single bureaucratic thing. Just one. I don’t blame you if you lose heart during this series, which I’m going to break up into a few episodes out of consideration for both my time and my sanity.

My hope is that if you know and love someone living in Italy then perhaps it will shed some light on what they probably go through on the daily, or at least, weekly. So the next time you get a call from an loved one living la dolce vita who is inconsolable over a garbage tax notice they didn’t manage to see crumpled under their welcome mat, you’ll have a little more context for why they’re so upset, and have an understanding that it’s probably not just about the garbage tax notice.

So buckle up, Utopia Italia subscribers. I’m going to detail for you in absolutely excruciating detail my journey to get a SPID, which is an official log-in credential - that’s right, it’s just a single username and password - that you can use to access various bureaucratic processes online. It’s supposed to make everything smoother, and I can see why they would think that.

Alright. Let’s begin.


Background Context

So before we launch into the journey to get the SPID, you need a little more context. Trust me, this all becomes important and feeds into the whole situation later.

 The first thing you need to know is that I received my Italian passport way back in 2016 after a years long process to be recognized as a citizen. One day approximately two years after I’d given up hope, my father received a letter in the mail from the Miami consulate. It wasn’t a particularly official letter— not many grand seals or embossing— but when I took it to the New York consulate to get my passport, it seemed to work (albeit begrudgingly: the official glared at me and asked what the hell he was supposed to do with a notice from the Miami consulate. “But it’s all Italian, isn’t it?” I insisted. “I moved to New York, so I’m coming here now.” “But I am not with the Miami consulate.” “Don’t you share records?” Ahhh, my first little taste of the Italian inefficiency!)

Flash forward several years, and Adam and I moved to bella Italia in early 2021. We originally arrived in Rome for what we always knew would be a brief time: Rome was simply the easiest place to land during harrowing Covid travel. (see the Arrival series for more on that)

Immediately, being good little immigrants, we try to figure out how to convert Adam’s tourist visa, which is only good for ninety days, into the carta di soggiorno, which is basically a green card, is good for five years, and which everyone- lawyers, friends, the internet- assured us would be easy as pie, because Adam is married to an Italian so legally has every right to be here.

We soon discovered that it would be impossible to get Adam’s carta di soggiorno if I didn’t have residency as well as citizenship, and as it turned out, obtaining residency in Italy was a much more complicated and serious proposition than in the US. 

Sidenote: I believe that this is because of just how very regional Italy tends to be. I’ve written about this before, but the country sometimes feels like a bunch of totally different kinds of nails and tacks and screws picked up and held together by a magnet. A weak magnet. Which probably contributes to the delights of the bureaucracy.

So before we could get my residency established, I needed a Codice Fiscale, which is what it sounds like: a fiscal code without which you are effectively not a real person. You need it to join a gym, get a phone, get official documents, order shampoo online (another true story).

So we apply for and receive my codice fiscale after a few weeks, and we did manage to get my residency updated to Rome…but only six months after arriving, literally the very day before we were set to move to Turin. Obviously I’m truncating this story.

But when we arrived in Turin we found ourselves in a similar predicament as when we arrived in Rome. See, you can’t just up and move in Italy. Well, you can, but it’s pretty unusual. Most people of our generation seem to live their lives where they were born: all of our friends in Rome grew up in Rome. All of our Torinese friends are from Torino or surrounding villages.

The problem is that it matters where you’re a resident (not a citizen, a resident) in a way that feels utterly foreign to Americans, for whom a cell phone contract and a utility bill of any sort is enough to get a new driver’s license: presto, residency!

We found ourselves unable to change my residency to Turin for two major reasons: 1) Adam’s carta di soggiorno process had been started in Rome, so it needed to be completed there, and I was told changing my residency would restart that entire process that we were several months into and 2) we didn’t have a ‘permanent address.’

Again, this is strange for Americans to fully comprehend, but there are about a billion different types of rental contracts and only a handful will confer residency, and frankly the whole rental situation was such a nightmare we straight up just bought an apartment. I mean, we also wanted to and had the means, but the frustrations of the rental market isn’t not a reason we bought.

But because we had left Rome almost immediately after I obtained said residency, I hadn’t managed to get my tessera sanitaria, or health card, before we left. Believe me, I tried— on our way home from the Anagrafe, kind of the central bureaucratic office, I specifically stopped at the local health agency to get the health card with my newly printed residency document. They refused me at the time because I didn’t have an identity card (which I wouldn’t receive for another three months because that, too, was a completely different appointment than simply getting recognized as a resident) and I didn’t have the plastic codice fiscale card— just an official document with it printed out.

I’ll pause here for a moment to note that our lawyers, to whom we paid an extortionate sum to deal with all of this so we wouldn’t have the stress (hah!) had assured me that the codice fiscale card was unimportant. You only ever needed to know the number, and anyway, when you got your health card the codice fiscale was also printed on that, so that’s what most people used.

The paper documents did not impress the officials in Rome that day, so given that we had to be up at four the next morning to move, I admitted defeat and figured I’d just get the health card in Turin.

As it turns out, you can’t register for the health care system outside of your place of residence. So that can was kicked down the road until I could update my residency, which again, couldn’t happen until Adam received his carta di soggiorno and we found a settled place to live.

Once we moved into our apartment on December 15th, I decided it was time to officially become Torinese and get my health card. We’re in a global pandemic, ya know? I’m pretty sure if I showed up at the emergency room they wouldn’t kick me out, but why tempt fate?

But to get my health card I needed to change my residency. No problem; I’d just make an appointment.

According to the Torino city website, I could only make an appointment to change my residency by logging into their system using SPID— as I said before, it’s an electronic log-in system that grants to access to government services. It’s not run by the government, exactly, but there are several companies that are certified to provide the service, and then it’s kind of like when you use Google to log into other websites… it just uses those credentials. It’s actually a pretty cool idea in theory.

I decided to try one of the main recommended services, SielteID, because they claimed I could set up the SPID online quite easily. I also desperately wanted to avoid using Poste Italiane, because I was still traumatized from the last time I had anything to do with the post office. Also, I was terribly suspicious of the future challenges I might be setting myself up for if any facet of the post office even had a whiff of my supposed ‘permanent address’ in Rome: I envisioned all of my bills and packages showing up there (several weeks late, of course) or other problems I couldn’t begin to imagine.

And if you’ve made it this far, that’s where I’ll leave you this time.

Thanks for tuning in. I’ll be back next week with SPID ACQUISITION PHASE ONE: SielteID.

Ciao for now!

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Utopia: An Italian Study
Utopia: An Italian Study
A somewhat futile attempt to make sense of life in Italy by pinning bizarre happenings down like butterflies* for observation and further study.
*No butterflies were harmed in the making of this series.
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