With the trip to Miami and our visa application completed, we turned to the next tasks confronting us. First, and more a pleasure than a task, we closed on the sale of our house in Fernandina a week after going to Miami. Closing day is always a good day and it’s even better if you don’t actually have to move then. We had arranged to rent back for a month, giving us until mid-May to finish packing. I had already been filling the many boxes Terry picked up each week and the guest bedroom was becoming crowded with boxes stacked against every available wall, but we were far from finished.
We had never questioned whether we should move our household furnishings to Italy, of course we should. We needed to furnish our house in Anghiari and some of our cherished antiques that would fit well into the historic home. What wasn’t antique or necessarily exceptional, we still liked well enough to take with us, so anything we could possibly use in Italy would be shipped. Outdoor furniture was to be left behind since we had no space for it in Anghiari and, reluctantly, we would sell our rather new car as the cost and trouble of refitting it to European requirements made taking it a poor choice.
There is, not surprisingly, a fair amount of paperwork attached to shipping furniture overseas. The company I had engaged was based in Florida, and offered house to house transferal; everything would be picked up at our house in Fernandina, and shipped to Italy, where a partner company would take over and deliver the contents to our home in Anghiari. For both companies, each item needed to be described and given a value–not only major pieces such as furniture, but also clothing, pots and pans…. every item that was to be shipped.
As usual, the Italian requirements presented the greatest difficulty. There was, once again, the matter of my married name vs my maiden name, requiring that I submit a copy of my marriage certificate to the company in Rome. In addition, I had to fill out an Autocertificazione, which promised that the shipment contained only personal household items, owned for at least a year, and which I would not sell or give away before our first year in Italy had passed. The greatest problem, though, was that we would not yet have a Permesso di Soggiorno. Anyone planning to stay in Italy must apply for this document on arrival but can’t expect to have it validated for several months. Unfortunately, it is also a requirement for moving furniture into the country. With luck we would land in Italy before our furniture did and would have at least applied for the Permesso, but we couldn’t count on that, let alone whether the mere application would be sufficient for bringing in furniture. Aldo, my contact at the shipping company in Rome suggested we could solve the problem by changing the port of entry from Livorno to Rome where he had a network of contacts. In Rome, he could utilize those contacts to get around the lack of a Permesso. Ah Italy.
With preliminary paperwork completed, we scheduled a pick up date, May 13, two days before we had to leave our house. Terry’s work load suddenly went into high gear, as he began to prepare for shipment of all his paintings from the past several decades. Paintings on stretchers would be crated by the shippers, but the many works on unstretched canvas had to be rolled and placed into cardboard tubes. While Terry attended to his paintings, I continued to empty cupboards, closets and drawers, packing some things for shipment and setting aside others for a garage sale scheduled for the end of April.
As all of our activities began to revolve around wrapping up our life in Fernandina, we decided to put the final stamp on our departure–purchasing the airline tickets that would take us to Italy. We planned to drive to New York, where Terry’s daughter lives, and fly from there after spending a few days with her. Adding together the several weeks the Miami consulate would need to process our application plus several more weeks as a margin of safety, we decided we could safely book a flight for the end of May.
Admittedly, by doing so, we put ourselves in some small jeopardy. We were ignoring the consulate’s advice not to purchase tickets until we received our visas as well as the possibility that our passports could be held for ninety days. However, we were concerned about the availability and cost of tickets if we waited until July to book. Moreover, waiting until then would delay our departure until well past the designated June 30 closing on our house in Anghiari, a date that might be altered but only at the inconvenience of everyone involved. And then there was that consulate dictum that we had to depart within ninety days of applying for visas. If one had to wait ninety days before booking a flight, violation was virtually ensured and what would be the consequence of that? Optimistically, we decided to rely on the consulate’s assurance that processing our visas would take only two to three weeks. As to the possible ninety day hold on passports, I considered that to be in the same category as the dire warnings attached to some medications–necessary for self-protection but highly unlikely to actually occur. We were quite confident that we could leave for Italy at the end of May and close on our Italian house soon after.
Lurching towards Italy 