Author: Roger Bergson

  • Finally, After Six Years…WiFi

    Learning to deal with Italian Utility Companies

    2019:

    Carol and Roger left Pienza for the Summer to spend time with family and friends in Seattle. During our absence, there was a thunderstorm. A lightning strike hit the power line feeding our street. The power surge fried computers, television sets, and any other appliance left on during the storm.

    Unbeknownst to us, one of the casualties of this lightning strike was our WiFi router. The utility company promptly sent out a crew to restore service to everybody who reported an outage. Since we were in Seattle and unaware of the storm, we never reported a problem and so did not get our service repaired.

    We returned to Pienza to find our phone line dead and our WiFi router fried. We called TIM (our provider of cell and internet service at the time). They promised to send out a repair team. After several more phone calls and a 6 week wait, we had an Italian friend make a more insistent call. Despite repeated promises, the TIM repair crew never showed up.

    2020:

    The year of the COVID pandemic. We hunkered down in Seattle and never made it to Pienza.

    2021:

    We gave up on TIM and tried another provider. It worked…but the “travel router” they provided was painfully slow, dropped data connections during high demand, and was generally unsatisfactory.

    2023:

    Then we heard about Open Fiber, the company bringing fiber optic internet service to all of Italy.

    The company is a hardware wholesaler, providing infrastructure for 32 different service providers. We got to take our pick.

    Our next door neighbors had just contracted with Vodafone for high speed internet service. The fiber optic cable entered their house 25 meters from ours. How hard could it be to extend the service one more house? We chose Vodafone to be our service provider.

    The company was happy to sign us to a new contract. They sent service techs out within a few days. They puttered around inside our apartment…

    Every connection they checked had been smoked by the power surge. They replaced all the boards and outlets inside the house. Still, no service.

    By the process of elimination they narrowed the source of the problem down to the junction box attached to the back of another neighbor’s house right behind us.

    The techs went around the block, buzzed the doorbell at that neighbor’s gate, and asked for permission to replace the circuit board inside the box. Our neighbor exploded in curses (even though Roger’s Italian is limited, he had no problem getting the drift of this tirade). The neighbor said he would call the Carabinieri (national police) if the techs so much as set foot on his property.

    The techs called Vodafone…who told them to give up and move on to their next assignment. It mattered not that another working internet feed was just a few meters away.

    2025:

    Out of pure frustration using our cell phones as internet hot spots, Roger gave Fiber One another try. If there were 32 available vendors, perhaps he could find one that would be willing to extend the fiber optic cable to our house from next door.

    This time, he chose Enel, the utility already providing our electrical service.

    As luck would have it, Fiber One sent the same technician out who was the subject of our neighbor’s tirade two years before. We explained we wanted to extend the cable from next door.

    The call to Enel produced better results. If we would dig a trench and bury conduit, Enel would allow Fiber One to extend the cable into our yard.

    It turns out, our back yard was in the middle of a complete remodel (note the new walkway that had just been set down). Maurizio, our neighbor and the stone mason who was doing the remodel, said he would dig the trench and lay the conduit. Of course, it turned out more complicated than we thought.

    After digging the trench and laying the conduit, Maurizio had to cut out the steps he had just installed (see black arrow above), burrow under the steps, then burrow under the newly-laid walkway.

    But in the end, we got a trough that…despite several unexpected turns… contained the cable that the technicians could bring into our apartment.

    After only 6 years, we finally have functioning WiFi.

    Now, all we have to do is remember to unplug the router when leave Pienza for any length of time. We never want to go through this adventure again.

  • Palio Update: And the Winner is….

    For those of you who inquired about how our horse did in the bareback race the day after the dinner…and there were a few…

    The Oca contrada’s horse…Godmade.

    The race did not come off as planned. For the first time in 155 years, a sudden rainstorm forced postponement of the event. See what it takes to postpone the Palio: Palio Rained out

    The race was rescheduled for the next day, July 3rd.

    We don’t want to give away what happened, so watch the attached video (which runs 2 minutes). Note this is a bareback horse race, no saddle, no stirrups for the jockeys. Invariably, not all the riders stay on their horses. If you watch carefully, you’ll see some horses finish on their own. Link: The Race Itself.

    Yes, the Oca horse Godmade won this year’s race.

    As the Italians say, “Vinci, Vinci, Vinci!”

    For those of you who want to see the full pageantry, the attached link (which runs 2 hours and 42 minutes) shows it all…without having to stand in a crowd of 40,000 for hours on end: Palio Pagentry.

  • Dinner at the Palio

    The city of Siena is world-famous for its bareback horse race, the Palio.

    The race draws 40-thousand spectators, all packed into the Campo… Siena’s main piazza.

    It’s been the setting for many a movie, including…a few years ago… the James Bond Film Quantum of Solace. A link to that movie scene is here: Quantun of Solace, Palio Scene.

    Siena’s Palio is, however, much more than a setting for a horse race. It’s mostly an opportunity for the city’s neighborhoods …contradas…to build a sense of community and show their spirit..

    The night before the horse race, each contrada hosts a neighborhood dinner. This one, in the Lumaca (Snail) contrada, was set up to feed one thousand people.

    We were impressed.

    Four hours before the dinners were scheduled to begin, flag and drum corps marched through the city, literally drumming up business.

    The contrada we were visiting was the Oca..Goose …neighborhood.

    The contrada got its name centuries ago, when intruders tried to sneak into the neighborhood, and the geese raised such a racket they woke up the residents who then sprang to their common defense.

    The theme is built into every neighborhood institution. This mosaic is in the floor of the church of Santa Caterina, the patron saint of Siena

    The church contains a museum of Palio victories.

    This one the 1874 horse race.

    …and the jockey’s silks from the 2013 win.

    Not to be outdone, the Oca flag and drum corps paraded through town…

    …followed by the horse who would race the next day…

    …and a gaggle of pre-teens, all decked out in contrada flags and singing the neighborhood anthem.

    At 9:30 pm, dinner finally began. Forty tables, all the size of this one.

    160 neighboor teens served the meal and cleaned up afterwards.

    How much pasta does it take to feed this many people?

    In case you were wondering, this is what a dinner with 1600 guests looks like.

    As the dignitaries entered, the crowd broke out in the contrada’s anthem, waving napkins as they sang.

    At the head table, the contrada’s capitano and race jockey were feted to a standing ovation.

    And while the inevitable speeches droned on, we made new friends…in this case a couple from Britain.

    A five course meal with three different wines. We were punched out.

    At about 1:00am, the festivities started to wind down. We made it back to Pienza at 3:00am, wondering how anybody from the contrada could make it to the horse race the next day.

    At least, some of the participants didn’t take the festivities too seriously.

    But note, the language on the tee shirt is not in Italian.

  • Streets Paved with Flowers

    In June, the streets of Pienza are naturally festooned with flowers.

    But one day in particular, the Pientini go out of their way with a lavish display of “floral opulence.”

    The day is called “Corpus Domini.” It dates back to the Middle Ages.

    Religious in origin, the celebration has taken on all aspects of a civic event. Acquaintances of ours, who almost never attend mass, eagerly participate in the decorations.

    Corso Rossolino, Pienza’s main street, is decorated from end to end with freshly harvested leaves and flowers…

    …as is every side street in the old city.

    Some of the designs are very intricate.

    Half the children in town seem to be involved with the decorating…

    …or wetting down the flowers to prevent them from wilting in the summer heat or being scattered by the breeze.

    It seems to Carol and Roger like an awful lot of work for something that lasts only a few hours. But the civic spirit and sense of community is one of the things that makes Pienza such an appealing place to live.

  • Legal Residents (?)

    This is the document that makes a foreigner a legal resident of Italy…a Permesso di Soggiorno.

    Carol and I got our first Permessi in 2017.  We had renewed the cards twice since without problem and believed we were starting to get the hang of it.

    So, we didn’t think much…back in September 2023…when it came time to renew again.

    The process starts here, at the local post office.  The application packet is hefty, and requires pages and pages of additional documentation… proof of income, assets, health insurance, residence, and a bolletino to pay for processing.

    A bolletino is a tax stamp. So, you purchase it at the Post Office, right? 

    Nope! 

    Anybody familiar with the Italian system knows you purchase stamps at the local tabac (tobacco shop).

    Please notice the computer printing on the tax stamp shown left.  It’s verification the bolletino was properly submitted.

    This will be important later.

    Carol returned to the post office to submit our applications.  Along with the receipt showing the applications were received, we got appointments for mandatory in-person interviews. 

    The appointments are supposed to come within 8 weeks of application submittal.

    Not in this case!  Our interviews were scheduled almost 20 weeks out…after we were due to leave the country and spend the winter in Seattle.

    Carol contacted the Questura di Immigrazione to reschedule and was told to hang onto the appointment document and ask for a new date after we returned.

    In May of 2024, we returned to Italy.  Note the expiration date on the Permesso di Soggiorno had passed.  We were no longer legal residents but perfectly legal tourists…so long as we departed the EU within 90 days of our arrival.

    Shortly after our May return, we received a document telling us we finally had an appointment the end of July.  We went, expecting to pick up our Permessi.

    Instead, we found that we needed to submit a copy of two additional bolletini and Roger’s health insurance card.  Once that was done, we were told, our Permessi should arrive in Siena in less than a month

    We submitted the necessary documents the next day.

    By the middle of October, having heard nothing and past our time as legal tourists, we began to worry and decided to revisit the Siena Questura.

    Since we had no appointment, we stood in line for more than two hours…finally helped by the same policewoman who had assisted us in July.  She told us our applications had not been processed because the second batch of bolletini had not been submitted.  Carol asked if the office in Rome had received Roger’s proof of health insurance (they had!)…at which point Carol showed her the one email that contained both the proof of insurance…and the “missing” tax stamps!

    Apparently, the bolletini had somehow gotten “lost” in their files.

     She forwarded that email to Rome, and said in slightly more than three weeks our Permessi would be in Siena.

    Meanwhile, we went next door to the Police Science Lab to get fingerprinted…since a fresh set of prints is required with each new Permesso card.

    Carol monitored the Immigrazione website almost daily.  Our documents continued to be labelled “in process.” 

    Until one day they weren’t.

    In mid-November, all of a sudden our applications had a new status: “no longer in archives.”

    We panicked.  What did this mean?  Carol called and emailed the Questure in both Rome and Siena…several times a day.  Nobody ever picked up the telephone and the emails were never returned.

    We hired an immigration attorney to see what he could find out.  He got no answers to his inquiries either.

    We now had a new problem.  Since we had overstayed our tourist time and didn’t yet possess our long-overdue residency permits, we were in legal limbo.  We had planned to fly back to the USA with a stop-over in Denmark, but our questionable legal status now prevented that. We had to find a country that was not party to the applicable international treaty and fly through it.

    Carol called the US Consulate in Firenze seeking help. The official she spoke to apologized that he was prohibited from offering advice. He told her, however, to hang onto his phone number and call in case we were arrested and detained trying leaving Italy.

    On our way to the airport in Rome, Carol and Roger each got a text.  The Questura di Immigrazione in Siena now had our completed Permessi.  We finally had an appointment to come pick them up…the day after we departed Italy

    We contacted the immigration attorney to tell him the news.  He offered to go to the Siena Questura and pick the Permessi up.  We accepted his offer and thanked him.

    After returning to Seattle, we wrote the attorney asking how he planned on forwarding the residency cards to us.  He told us, the police would not give him the cards because they did not have copies of our fingerprints…the same fingerprints they had recorded just a month before!.  Another two documents lost in the morass of Immigrazione bureaucracy!

    When we returned to Italy the end of May this year, we promptly headed up to Siena.  After another two hours of standing in line, then being told nobody could help us because we didn’t have an appointment, we finally begged our way into the office.  And…

    Voila!

    We received our new residency cards…

    ….only 618 days after we started this process.

    Notice the expiration date on the card:  December 2025! In a few weeks, we’re going to have to start this adventure all over again.

    Postscript: One of our friends…an American living just outside Siena…had very little sympathy for our tale of woe. She told us when she retired and applied for Social Security, it took her five years battling the American bureaucracy before she got her benefits.