Dual Italian Citizenship - and then there is Castel San Pietro Terme

A week later Luigi called to tell me that he had located one small commune in Castel San Pietro Terme, about 45 minutes away from Bologna that thought they could accept my documents. They were asking to see all of the originals. I made a trip to the Commune there the very next day. The woman there reviewed everything and told us that she believed everything would be ok, but she wanted a few days to research a few things. There was also one item I had to handle before they could begin. My passport needed to have stamps indicating I entered Italy stamped in it. I entered the EU in Frankurt, then took a connecting flight to Venice. Upon arrival in Venice, no one stamps your passport if you are entering from another EU country. Luigi had an easy solution: fly to London and fly back, and have my passport stamped upon arrival in Italy. It seemed too good to be true. On March 15, I flew from Venice to Gatwick airport in London, sat for 4 hours, and then flew back to Venice. When I got back home that night, I pulled out my passport to look at the stamps, and realized that the person who stamped my passport in the morning in Venice had the wrong date on the stamp. It showed that I left Venice on March 16 and returned on March 15. All I could think was " Is there anything else that could go wrong???" I figured that this could be explained away as a clerical error since I had a plane ticket to prove what day I flew on.

Venice footnote…

In the meantime, I visited the Commune in Venice one more time, hopeful that they had reviewed my documents and would decide to handle my case. Instead, they told me that my mother's name is Guilia on one document but Guiliana on a second document. Since they didn't match, these documents wouldn't be acceptable. Figures!

The woman in Castel San Pietro Terme took alot longer to get back to us than we expected, partially because of the Easter holiday. Finally we got very positive news, and I was told that I should be at Luigi's office first thing on Monday 3/31 with my suitcase as we would be going to Castel San Pietro Terme to begin the process of establishing residency. Luigi had found an apartment for me to share with another girl who was doing the same process. I would only have to be physically present in the apartment until the local police come to conduct an interview, which Luigi estimated would only take a week to complete.