Victory is ours, though it’s a little hard to work up the emotions to celebrate

We had a terrific surprise today! A very good one. We went to our ragioniere, our accountant, to pay our spring property taxes yesterday. I mentioned to him that we were working on Lucy’s citizenship so she wouldn’t have to pay taxes on her share of our house.

‟She’s a resident of Montecarlo now, but not yet an Italian citizen,” I said.

‟But that’s all you need,” he said. ‟If she’s a resident, you’ll only have to pay taxes for the days she wasn’t a resident.”

I asked him to repeat that, because I couldn’t believe my ears—or at least the way my fuzzy brain translated his Italian words into English. Yes, since Lucy became a resident at the end of March, we only had to pay three months of property taxes this year, which amounted to 88 euro. So from now on, we will be saving about 30 euro a month.

I had not fully understood the laws, thinking that only citizens were exempt from property taxes on their first house—but the law apparently applies to official residents as well. We had been priming ourselves to go through the final red tape of obtaining Lucy’s citizenship. I had been comparing it to playing in the NCAA tournament, and claiming that we had made it to the championship bracket. Now, it was like learning that our opponent had been disqualified for recruiting violations. We are the champions without having the play the final game—or rather, we can play the final game, but we’ll get the trophy whether we win or lose.

We have the prize, but now it’s going to be hard to motivate ourselves to get all the documents we need for Lucy to become a citizen. What will be the reward? Our children are already citizens. We’ve been told that Lucy’s residency will also qualify her for medical care. There could be other benefits of which we aren’t yet aware, so we will try to muster up the motivation to move ahead.

Meanwhile, pop open the prosecco, which we can buy at the end of April with the 30 euros that we would otherwise have spent on taxes!