End Game

It was time to wrap up phase one of our plans to move to Italy. We had sold our car, moved to another and final hotel in Fernandina and now just waited for our passports to be returned, hopefully with the Elective Residency visa stamped inside. As we approached the ninety day limit that the Miami consulate could hold our passports, I began to pepper them with emails reminding them that the deadline was approaching, and asking “where are our passports?” To no avail; there was, as usual, no response.

Until, that is, the morning of July 11th, when I opened an email from the consulate to find a brief note simply giving a FedEx tracking number–FedEx? What happened to the U S Post Office, stamped Express mail envelopes we had submitted with our application? The consulate web site had stated that only USPO envelopes could be used to return our passports. Still, we now knew that our passports had been sent just in time to make the July 12 flight to Italy. We hurried to the local FedEx office to pick up our envelopes as soon it opened, only to find that they had been sent on to the Jacksonville office and shortly would be returned to Miami. The delivery to our former home address had failed since we no longer lived there. Had our USPO envelopes been used as expected, they would have been forwarded to us as we had instructed the post office to do.

We drove to the Jacksonville FedEx center in something of a panic, fearing that the envelopes had already been sent back to Miami. Thankfully, there they were, at last. We ripped open the envelopes, hoping for and maybe even anticipating, good news, but found instead a letter telling us we had been denied the Elective Residency visas. After all the effort, waiting, and expense, we now viewed an answer we had hoped not to see. The reason? Although we had fully paid off our house in Anghiari, the consulate determined that we lacked adequate proof of housing. Had they ever looked at the receipts and Certificate of Habitability I sent to back up our Preliminary Contract? Apparently not. In fact, the date of the denial was April 10, the day after we submitted our application. Italian bureaucracy is known to be inefficient, slack and uneven, and completely absent any policy of helpfulness to those needing their services; the process of applying for the ER had just given us our first lesson in how it all worked. Disappointed and more than a little perturbed at the hasty decision and failure to consider supplemental information, we drove back to Fernandina to finish packing before heading to Miami for our flight to Italy.

We had decided to drive part way to Miami that afternoon so that we would not have to make a long drive followed by an overnight flight the next day. It also gave us a little decompression time in which to absorb our situation. Lack of a long stay visa meant that we would have to leave Italy and the entire European Union, for ninety days out of every one hundred and eighty. With our primary, in fact only home now in Italy, we would have to figure out how and where to spend the time we could not be there.

It was a good thing we split the trip across two days; the traffic into Miami the next day was heavy and sometimes moved forward at barely a crawl. We began to fear that we would arrive at the airport too late to catch our flight; we were, after all, in Murphy’s Law mode with no reason to believe there might be a reprieve. In the end, we did arrive in time to return our rental car and reach the check-in desk a little over an hour before our flight was to begin loading. When we placed our suitcases on the scale, we saw that our heavily packed luggage was overweight, but the helpful lady at Air Italy suggested we simply purchase an inexpensive bag from a nearby kiosk and redistribute everything. When Terry returned with the new, ample but flimsy “luggage,”we began hurriedly unpacking items and throwing them into the spare bag. We must have looked as harried as we were feeling, but in a few minutes all suitcases were within the 23 kilo weight limit. We were alarmed all over again when told that rabies documentation for our dogs was missing, but thankfully the staff eventually found it among the sheaf of papers we had supplied. Finally, after going through the security checks, we got to our gate, where we could at last relax, looking forward to the long transoceanic flight that would put us into a state of suspended animation for the night.

The dogs slept through the flight and we were pleasantly surprised at the good quality of the service and food on this new-to-us airline. We arrived in Milan in late morning then picked up a rental car to make the four hour drive to Anghiari. Though we could not yet move into our new home, we would at least be in our new home town. By five o’clock, we were settled into a hotel on the edge of Piazza IV Novembre, a short distance from where we would soon live.