Permesso di soggiorno in hand, but we take little time to celebrate

One month and two days ago, Lucy underwent her finger- and hand-printing at the Polizia Scientifica and Questura di Lucca. We paid with our marca da bollo and left with an officially stamped receipt. And we were told that in a month, we’d get a phone call telling us to come in and get her permesso di soggiorno.

Lucia in Lucca

We watched the calendar carefully. Saturday marked four weeks. Monday was 30 days, Tuesday 31. Surely one of those dates should have been the benchmark signifying one month, but we’d received no phone call. And so, tired of waiting, we drove to the Questura this morning to ask in person.

Sportello 1, the window for permesso documents, had no line at all. But it also had no one at the desk. The other three windows, used by refugees, all had long lines, and we didn’t want to wait in one of them because after a long wait, we’d only have been told we were in the wrong line. But where was the nice lady from Sportello 1?

‟There’s her glasses on her desk,” Lucy pointed out. ‟She’s probably taking her morning break at the local coffee bar.” And indeed, after standing alone in the line for 10 minutes, we were rewarded by her appearance. And further, when she want to check in the back of the office, she quickly found Lucy’s permesso di soggiorno. There was no pounding of drums or singing by angels, just ‟Here you go; that’s all.” Lucy signed, and we were done in one minute.

And so concludes satisfactorily a saga that had begun 15 years earlier, when we unsuccessfully tried to get permessi for all four of us in Padova. But we took no time to celebrate, because this is only step one. We drove straight back to Montecarlo to present Lucy’s documents to the municipio. Now we wanted Lucy’s residency documents.

Once again we had to wait, this time about 15 minutes for an absent clerk. But when she came, we had everything in hand: permesso, passaporti, codice fiscale, estratto di matrimonio. The signora took nearly a half hour to enter everything in her computer, make photocopies and carefully stamp every form and photocopy. Then we were sent upstairs to the office of protocollo for more document checks, computer entries and stamping of documents.

Now the police will come to make il controllo anagrafico, the official check to make sure Lucy lives at via Roma, 49. Knowing that this can take a month or so, we stopped by the police office on the way out of the municipio to let them know we will soon be having a lot of guests and want the check to take place as soon as possible. We settled on either Tuesday or Wednesday morning. When this takes place, Lucy can go back to the municipio and get her carta d'identità, and we’ll be done with step two. We’ll waste no time starting step three, which will mean another trip (most likely many trips) to Lucca for her citizenship. Can we squeeze this in before we leave in barely more than a month? As Lucy likes to say, the chances are 50/50; either we will or we won’t. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion.