It all began one stifling hot Florentine September afternoon when twenty-five already overwhelmed college students were crammed into one Linguaviva classroom to be given to heart wrenching news: “Rules for Residence Permits (Permisso di Soggiorno) have CHANGED” (insert aggravated groan here). Fifty yards of paperwork — in Italian, and filled out en mass with one professor giving instructions no one could understand until the third repetition and another professor inserting her advice every sentence or so — later, we began to insanity of gathering all necessary documents and condensing them into one comprehensive list: passport, photocopies of passport, insurance statement, letter from Linguaviva, passport sized photos of . . . no wait, those are for later . . . proof of financial support — which apparently is just a photo copy of your credit card — and a few other things . . . no, that’s it . . . um . . . maybe . . . no, that’s all you need, for now. You’ll need the rest — including receipts from the post office — for when you go to get finger printed down at the police station later, (at this point, don’t ask me what “the rest” entails). Oh yeah, and you’re going to have to pay fourteen euro for a stamp so they can mail everything about three blocks to the police station, and then twenty-nine for this, and another about forty more for that, and don’t blame ACM because no one knew about this until, well, right now.
Next step, of course, is to find a guinea pig — one daring soul who’s either too brave or too impatient to wait for things to be fermented and most deal with the entire thing immediately. Having dispatched this student, we all sat back and waited from the inevitable entrance of a professor into our morning class saying “here’s what we learned . . .”: photo copies of everything, basically, since you’ll need the originals later, no need for the proof of financial support — save it for later. Likewise, save the photos. When you go to the post office, you’ll get four recites, one of which has the appointment date when you must appear at the police station and give them the remaining paperwork.
Okay, by now we’ve been in Italy for about two weeks. After class, after searching the Piazza della Signoria for the post office for about fifteen minutes (and the Piazza isn’t that big), my roommate and I make it inside and take a number. At least I can say this: the lady working at that window was extremely nice. She knew exactly what she was doing, and all I had to do was hand her what she asked for and sit back while she stamped, and endorsed, and scanned, and scrutinized, and ran to the back room, and printed, and ran to the back room again, and typed, and wrote over every one of my trillion pieces of paper. So, about two hours and seventy-three euro later, I was the proud holder of a piece of paper that says I basically have to go do the entire thing again, only even more involved at the police station where they’re almost guaranteed to be less friendly, on September twenty-ninth. At this point, thankfully, September twenty-ninth is almost a month away, so I can go home and block the entire thing out of my mind for a few weeks.
Today, six days before my own impending doom, Janet – our mighty, awesome and dearly loved leader in the ACM Florence program — takes a group of students, who had appointments for today, down to the police station. She interrupts our Italian class about twenty minutes in — a usual important announcement time here at Linguaviva – to tell us this. An hour and a half or so later, so interrupts class again, once again heralding the words “here’s what we found out,”: no more appointments. She was told at the station that, rather than having all twenty-five of us sit there for hours, just to get another number and sit for a few more hours, to get fingerprinted and turn in information, so we can get another appointment and do it all over again in a few weeks to be re-fingerprinted and receive — probably only weeks before returning to the United States by that point — at long last our residence permit, rather than that, she just has to write a letter saying we all have important classes and fieldtrips that we can’t possibly miss so that our appointments can be rescheduled for January — a month after we have left the country.
Ah, politics! It’s a good thing we have all this paperwork and hoop jumping to occupy our time. Without it, too much freedom would drive us, through boredom and lack of stress, to a vegetative state little better than the primordial ameba.
