For any of you out there going through this process, remember the 3 P's of living in Italy. Patience, Perseverance and Purpose. Living here it is not enough to be patient, you must also remember the purpose of whatever activity you have started and persevere by never, ever, giving up, as Churchill said. Having said that, I wouldn't blame you if you do give up. Engaging with the Italian bureaucracy is worse than watching 3 Fellini movies back to back.
A little background about Italian citizenship.
Requirements of Italian citizenship.
A. Citizenship is acquired by jure sanguinis, meaning you are born or adopted by Italian citizens. (Juri sanguinis is how I acquired my Italian citizenship by showing the Italian line from my grandparents to me. Another long and difficult process.) In the US, currently, you must only show that you were born in the US.
B. You can request citizenship if you have resided in Italy for 10 years and can show sufficient income to sustain yourself, have no criminal record, and no issues with the Italian state.
C. You can become an Italian citizen through marriage to an Italian citizen.
We are going with "C". So what are the basics of the process? They look oh so simple, but remember where you are.
1. Applicant must be married to an Italian citizen. Check
2. Applicant must provide an original birth certificate translated by an officially registered translator, and have it officially stamped and registered by the court. (We had a translator in Florence do all of this for us. We highly recommend her.) Check
3. Applicant must be legally resident in Italy for at least 2 years after the marriage. Check
4. If the applicant's marriage was performed abroad, the marriage certificate must be transcribed and certified in the municipality of residence. Ok here is the first interesting road block. We were married in Newport Beach, Ca. We had to have our marriage registered in Vigo di Cadore where my citizenship was established. You can only imagine calling into this small commune and asking for them to register a marriage of people they have never heard of. Sigh. Luckily we have the nicest commune in the world in Umbertide. They called for us, explained all of the situation, and the commune of Vigo eventually sent a document certifying the marriage. They had never had to do this before and they were stressed out by the request. But finally, check.
5. A legalized criminal background check stating the applicant's judicial history. This needs to be done by the FBI and the state. The results must be apostilled by the US state department for the FBI and the state background check must be apostilled by the state department conducting the background check, in our case, California. This must then be translated by aforementioned registered translator and then taken to court to register with the all important stamp. (There are services in the US that will do the paperwork for you including the apostille.) The background search must be completed, translated and certified no later than 6 months before you submit your application. Eventually check.
6. Information given in both Italian and foreign documents must be the same in all documents. Discrepancy can be remedied by the Consulate which will certify that the various names and places refer to the same person. (For American citizens, this of course is done in English which means the documents then must be taken to aforementioned translator for translation and stamp.)
Number 6 looks harmless enough but it was almost a deal breaker for us. Some of the Stoic One's documents had his middle name on the document, some did not. So we had to go back to the Consulate. Some documents said he was born in Los Angeles, California, others said California, back to the Consulate. It is about this time that both patience and perseverance started to wane. Was this really worth all the trouble and expense? Each problem had to be addressed with the certified translator and the certified stamp and that old problem of US logic kicked in. I mean how stupid is this that we have to prove Los Angeles and Los Angeles, Ca. are the same thing? Here is where our sense of purpose carried us through. The Stoic One really wanted to get this done. So did all the documents again and translated and certified.
We received an email from the "Ministero del Interno in Perugia telling us we had one more "name problem to fix" and then to come into the office on Monday or Wednesday between 9:30 and 12:30.
The email also said to bring in all of the original documents including the original bollo for 200 Euros. (The Stoic One had all of the original documents, translations, apostilles stamps, EXCEPT for the bollo, but he had a copy of the bollo so we went off in a hopeful frame of mind.) What could go wrong?
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