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.
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