Permit to Stay....do you really want to?

14 March 2006

I don’t want to sound like a whinger but by the time you get to the end of this you will no doubt have formed the opinion that I am exactly that. I know Gi and I have been through this settling in process before but it doesn’t get any easier and there never seems to be a lack of problems and issues for us to overcome. If you wish to avoid the full onslaught of whinging in the extended version of the last few days finish reading now, knowing only that we are healthy, well fed, and heading north on Friday 17th for a week or so to visit Gi’s relatives near Udine.

For those that wish to feel less jealous about our decision to move to Italy and embrace la dolce vita, here it is in black and white.

It’s been a challenging week. We spent Monday 6th driving around the central business district, mostly lost, looking for the Immigration Office of the City Prefect. It seems that many of these streets have become one-way streets, and there is a great deal of work going on around the city (restoration, as the Neapolitans seem to have realised the value of their historical buildings in recent years). Gigi was struggling as we went round and round in circles looking for the office where we thought I needed to apply for my ‘Permit to Stay”. Finally we arrive, follow the signs to the first floor only to be told we need to go to another building and upstairs. We are greeted by two lovely young women who don’t even understand the statement that I already have a visa and need to apply for a “Permit to Stay”. After an hour of conversation, with one of them running back and forth to an unseen supervisor it unravels that we are in the wrong place. The young woman seated behind the big desk asks how old we think she is. I guess 23, thinking she couldn’t be that young working in such a role but that a little flattery is expected. She’s 21, and reveals that they are both on work experience and still studying 1st year language (English and Arabic) at university to eventually be interpreters. They were accepting the initial application for people seeking citizenship, mostly asylum seekers from Eastern Europe, north Africa and the Middle East. Needless to say, my Australian passport with a valid spouse visa completely threw them as it failed to comply with the routine process that they’d rote learnt from the ‘unseen supervisor’. We are advised to go to the Questura – police headquarters – and it’s only then that I remember that this is indeed the instructions detailed on a sheet of paper that the Italian Consulate in Brisbane have helpfully attached beside my visa….full points to Jenny for wasting the whole morning.

To save the day from being a complete write off we visited the famous “Veiled Christ” (ask Margaret Barea, a friend of my parents who recently claimed it was the best sculpture she’d seen and the highlight of their trip to Italy). The “Veiled Christ” is an exquisite sculpture by Guiseppe Sanmartino in Museo Cappella di San Severo, a small chapel in a side street in the historical centre that is completely unassuming from the outside. The sculpture depicts Christ after he’s been removed from the cross, with his body covered by a shroud. According to the museum’s information sheet “it is a superb play of light and shadow, death is no longer seen as a painful separation from life, but as a poetic moment”. And indeed it is.

The next two days were emotional, with tears (Gi cries at the drop of a hat…J) and I felt like I was back to being an exchange student all over again.

Tuesday we went to the Police HQ in the downtown shopping area only to arrive there and be told again (!!) that we were at the wrong office. The Police HQ Immigration Office is back near the business district, and exactly the same place where I’d applied for my Permit to Stay some 5 years ago. Gi’s mother had advised that she thought the Immigration Office had moved. In accordance with the way Naples operates, her mistaken advice had now sent us on two days of wild goose chasing.

Wednesday morning was spent at Rosa’s office organising the relevant documents. Full of confidence that finally we were going to at least submit my application we arrived at the Questura Immigration Office to be confronted with a crowd of twenty people at the door and a policeman trying to maintain some sort of order. Bypassing the crowd looking for the relevant queue we were pulled up and told to return tomorrow morning, early, as they hand out 40 tickets each morning and that’s who gets served that day. This was, in fact, the same procedure as 5 years ago, and to say I was disappointed that things hadn’t changed (read improved) would be an understatement. In an effort to make ourselves known to this police officer and ease the following morning’s distress Gi spent a few minutes confirming what time we should arrive and what documents to bring with us. After all, as I was slowly starting to rediscover, Naples is a city where you need to have contacts, connections and ‘friends’, even if it is the police officer that you met yesterday with whom you exchanged local dialect and a friendly joke.

So, Wednesday morning we are up before 6am and at the Immigration Office, in the ‘queue’ by 7am. The concept of a ‘queue’ in Naples is something of a novelty. We joined the loosely formed line that was made up of North Africans, Polish, Chinese and others. All speaking accented dialect being the only language they shared. As the hour slowly passed Gigi became increasingly confused between his learnt habit of conforming to the queue system as in Australia and his Neapolitan habit to not allow anyone else to be in a better situation than him. In fact, if there is anything that seems to be worse in Naples it’s that everyone operates solely to their individual purpose, to the detriment of others wherever it’s required. The idea of developing a ‘win win’ solution is as alien to Neapolitans as the idea of life without pizza and pasta. As Gi’s stress levels rise, and his impatience increases he starts pulling up new arrivals that try to jump into the queue. One lady in particular, well dressed but obviously not Italian, joins the queue directly in front of me and after a minute Gigi politely approaches her to tell her the end of the queue is in fact way back there. Ignoring him turns out not to be a good tactic. Turning her back to him fails to stop his questions. Eventually she explains she is there for her mother (an older lady in a fur, smaller and speaking Polish), has only this morning available to sort it out and that she has to get back to work. Most of the growing crowd confirm that they are also on their way to work and don’t want to wait any longer than necessary. His anger increases, and he continues to represent those around us protesting that she should be at the end of the queue. Gigi is not the only local loudly complaining about her behaviour. Another man, much taller and more portly than Gi is making his opinion known as well. He also continues to remind everyone that he is the fourth in the queue (no one argues with him, despite the fact that he moves in and out of the queue, first to get a coffee, then to collect a pathetic looking umbrella from his car as a light rain begins to fall). But there is no moving her, and his scowling face, shaved head, various piercings and tattoos fail to intimidate her (to her credit, this is not a city where you want to be easily intimidated).

8.10am and the outer door rolls up. To my surprise they aren’t opening the door closest to the start of the queue, but the door which is just to my left where the Polish lady has established herself next to another group of Easter European woman. The crowd jostles forward, Gigi firmly plants himself behind me and we wait. Unexpectedly one of the Eastern European women declares that she has left an important document at home and is going to relinquish her spot in the queue (now one of the top three) for the Polish woman Gi argued with earlier. I’m incredulous but the exchange happens and no further protests are made. Several minutes later the next door opens and the police officer from yesterday appears, shuffling a pile of numbered tickets. The large portly fellow appears to my right and pushes his way to the front of the group, his loud and emphatic ‘excuse me’ paving his way until he reclaims his number 4 spot. The crowd had now grown to about 80 people and with only 40 tickets available there was obviously some contest to be one of the anointed few. The pushing had started, tensions rising as we struggled to keep our places (or gain a better one) and stand firm against those surging forward. The police officer requested everyone present their passports, so I struggled to find the space to open my bag and retrieve it as opposed to closely guarding it as I’d done for the last hour. The first few went through, holding the numbered ticket like they’d won the lottery. The Polish lady suddenly found herself inside with her mother still at the back of the group attempting not to get trampled. An African gentleman (for want of a better word) who had been behind me somehow appeared directly in front of me, placing his arm down across the doorway to prevent anyone else from entering ahead of him. I was struggling to not let the pushing crowd behind me impact on those ahead, conscious that I didn’t want the police officer to think I was contributing to any of the unruly behaviour around me. I unexpectedly found myself inside, with the police officer addressing Gigi, a flash of my passport and we’d secured No 8B. Relief flooded through me, as I’d been recalling a similar experience five years earlier that had been even more uncivilised (read brutal)*.

We found ourselves a seat, the intensity of the process finally hit me and I realised I was close to tears. However, Gigi brought my attention to the fact that the African ‘gentleman’ who’d pushed his way in front of us was sitting there holding ticket No 24B. As is the way in Naples, his pushing and manipulating his way physically was no match for Gigi’s polite conversation of the previous day, making it known that he was a local and respected accordingly by the police officer.

Eventually No 8B flashed up on the screen and we entered another room; cold white tiles gleaming and empty except for two Chinese men standing at one of the service windows. Two police officers dealt with my application politely and professionally. One reviewing the paperwork we presented and the other filling in the relevant forms. My heart sank at one stage when he asked for a copy of our translated marriage certificate – the only thing I didn’t bring because the Italian Consulate in Brisbane advised us it wasn’t necessary. I was suddenly afraid that without this bit of paper my whole application would be delayed. Organising for someone to find and get our original certificate translated and sent over from Brisbane was not something I wanted to think about. He called a colleague over for consultation and (thankfully) was advised that it wasn’t necessary, as I needed to submit it as part of my visa application.

Halfway through the process a young man from the local café came in with a tray of small plastic cups covered with aluminium foil. This is the Italian style for take away coffee, except you ring up the café and they delivery it to you. Our two processing friends disappeared without any explanation for several minutes, reappearing to say they’d had to take a coffee break. Gigi laughed, and confirmed that of course that was necessary at this time of the morning, under these circumstances. Inside, I’m thinking about why couldn’t they wait til they’d finished processing my application (knowing without even asking that in Italy coffee comes before work, always, without question). They finished up the application and then sent us back into the waiting area for the second part of the process.

This next stage didn’t happen five years ago. And I’m hoping that I’ll never have to do it again either. I was called into a small room, with a slight medical/laboratory look about it. Gigi asked the man in the white coat (I’m not kidding) if he could come with me explaining that my Italian was limited (thanks Gigi, but he knows I’m shy in these circumstances, although my Italian was sufficient for what was to follow). No, I am to enter alone. So I go in, I’m asked to roll my sleeves up, and while I’m doing that he confirms that my name and details on the sheet are correct. Then he’s using a roller thing on a big wad of what looked like tar, but must have been ink. Mr White Coat then runs the roller over my finger pads on my left hand. Taking my hand, in a completely unromantic style, he guides my fingers one by one into the allocated boxes on the sheet. This is repeated for the right hand. Then to my horror he applies the ink to my whole hand, palm and all and takes a full print of both hands, and a secondary print of each thumb. I’m feeling a bit mortified, imagining what it must be like to be arrested in Italy and finger printed. God forbid a cavity search. Mr White Coat tells me to wash my hands, we’re finished, and points me in the direction of the bathroom with a very basic hand washing facility where I spend the next five minutes, and five lots of soap trying to remove the heavy black ink from my hands. I bid Mr White Coat farewell, and exit looking none the worse for wear but feeling slightly violated.

We finally leave, walking out of the waiting room full of a menagerie of people; it now being almost four hours after we first arrived. Gigi makes a point of farewelling the police officer managing the ever-present queue. It’s now a matter of waiting. The system has improved slightly in that we are requested to send a text message to a mobile phone number quoting only my application reference number. When the ‘Permit to Stay’ is ready we will receive a text advising it can be collected. It will take over 2 weeks, but honestly if I get it within a month I’ll be surprised.

But at least the application is in, and we can now move on to obsessing about something else.

* I had to apply for a Permit to Stay in July 1999 last time we came to Italy. That experience was more intimidating as I was one of only two women in the pushing, heaving crowd of men using their strength and stupidity to secure one of the 40 tickets. We’d arrived early that morning only to find that those already there had started a ‘list’ of names, which they expected, would be translated into tickets in the corresponding order. Gigi refused to participate, knowing as a local that such a system was doomed. When the doors opened and they presented the ‘list’ to the police officer he quickly reviewed it and then screwed it up, throwing it out onto the street. But the thing I remember most from that morning is feeling distressed and at risk physically. During the pushing and shoving to grab a ticket I was sexually harassed. I remember the men in the crowd rubbing up against me, stray hands finding there way to my buttocks, elbows sliding across my breasts. As seems to be the case with me I was so mortified that at the time I did nothing. But with hindsight I will be prepared to stamp my heels down and swing my elbows should I be placed in similar circumstances again.

If you made it to the end you are to be congratulated. Feel free to leave me a comment to remind me to stop complaining and just enjoy the ride...I am after all living la dolce vita.