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(page 6 of 6)
The Italian Job
Want to actually work abroad? Attenzione
By Kathy GilsinanI was born in St. Louis, but I’ve never been stuck here.
Until I took a notion to be elsewhere.
In August 2006, with a brand-new bachelor’s degree and not much to do with it, I abandoned my beloved hometown for Piemonte, Italy, to take a job as a writer and translator. I settled into the adorable little town of Bra. I had a charming landlady with a bonkers dog who loved me, a palatial apartment for a mere 400 euros a month and the best pizza joint—I’m still convinced—in the entire world, right across the street from me. (The name, Pizza Blitz, belies its appeal.) There were cobblestones and sumptuous evenings on my terrace (from which on clear days the Alps were visible) and wine tastings and aperitivo hours with Italian men whose fascination with blondes rendered me enormously popular. I was ciaoing around like crazy, inhaling towering heaps of ravioli, and my halting Italian elicited nothing worse than indulgent condescension, which suited me just fine.
This wasn’t a vacation, though it felt like one. I was working, in a manner of speaking, though the practically mandatory two-hour lunch break was its own mini-vacation every day. Imagine going out for an Italian lunch—in Italy!—before heading back to work. Then imagine snagging a gelato to devour at your desk, and you’ll have some idea why it was hard to think of my job as “work.”
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I was, in any case, being groomed to take over the international communications office of Slow Food, a food-focused organization that has chapters all over the globe. Many of these chapters are in English-speaking countries—my job was to render the movement’s vague philosophy, barely decipherable in Italian, into English for brochures, newsletters and communiqués to members. The basic idea, and the basic reason I was getting paid to live in Italy, is that people should support their local farmers, concentrate on the sustainability of food production and, of course, eat lots of delicious stuff. Legend has it that all of this suddenly occurred to Slow Food’s founder, Carlo Petrini, a former socialist politician, when he witnessed a McDonald’s being opened near the Spanish Steps in Rome. He complained about the homogenization of food production over wine with some friends. An international movement was born.
That movement’s headquarters is in Petrini’s hometown, a sleepy hilltop village in northern Italy, about an hour south of Turin. It took some time to get used to a few things about Bra, not least that that was its real name. Sleeping late on Saturday would mean a grocery-less weekend—supermarkets were open only in the morning that day, and not at all on Sunday. Nor could you use your lunch break to buy the groceries you hadn’t that weekend; stores were closed for the precise two hours you were allowed out of the office. Stores would also be closed if you tried to go after work, as that time was after the store owners’ work, too.
Cafés were open after work, however, and this is when the youth of Bra congregated at or between three or four places on the main hangout street, Via Cavour. My favorite, Converso, served brilliant cappucino, which, by the way, is a breakfast drink; order one after 10 a.m. and risk outing yourself as a foreigner. Via Cavour couldn’t have been more than the length of a
St. Louis block, but it was wide and paved with cobblestones, with a church on each end and umbrella-covered tables on every patch of sidewalk. For two euros, you could get a drink and a plate of predinner snacks: prosciutto, breadsticks and bruschetta to go with your Campari.
Meanwhile, my three-month tourist visa was running out. I knew how to handle this, though; the Italian consulate in Chicago had told me that in order to get a work visa, which would enable me to stay for a year, I needed first to get a work permit. And for some reason, getting the permit required my physical presence in Italy.
I didn’t discover until I got there that the office in Italy responsible for such things had a different idea. They wouldn’t issue me a permit without a visa. And I could only get a visa in my country of origin. I explained in panicky Italian that the office in the States had explained the situation to me in reverse: permit first, then visa. A put-upon carabinieri—the military police, who wear Armani, carry automatic weapons and for some reason staff the permit office—explained to me, with exaggerated patience, “No, signora. Non si fa.” It’s just not done.
Perfect. Somebody was lying to me. The other possibility was that everyone was telling me the truth. That would be much worse. I emailed the consulate to ask, and their response ran something like this: “We don’t understand your situation. In order to help you, we need a copy of your visa and work permit.”
This was more than a Catch-22. It was at least a Catch-33. I needed advice to get the work permit or the visa, the visa to get the work permit, the work permit to get the visa, and both to get the advice on how to get either. In a later email, my consular correspondent suddenly decided that I additionally needed approval from the Region of Piemonte in order to live there. The Region of Piemonte, though, had never heard of such a thing and had never given any such kind of approval. They seemed disinclined to start with me.
It’s awkward to feel as if a whole country is conspiring to keep you out of it. As Americans, we are born into a place where an awful lot of other people want to be; most of them won’t be welcomed here, simply by virtue of the fact that they were born elsewhere. For all the dreamy talk I hear about globalization erasing borders and leveling playing fields, borders are much more complicated than physical barriers. They’re fortified with paperwork and red tape.
So three months into my fabulous European adventure, my tourist visa ran out, and I was back in old St. Lou, gathering documents for another chance at those cobblestones, that terrace and those Alps. One of these was my flight itinerary, a pricey document indeed, but one that would ostensibly encourage the consulate to issue me a visa before the scheduled departure date.
Not so. That date came and went; a few days before I was set to leave, the consulate asked me to supply some more documents from Italy. When I pointed out that those weren’t on their website’s list of requirements, my interlocutor sniffed that they didn’t have room to post every requirement online.
I don’t want to call this guy a bugiardo, or liar, nor even a stronzo, which I’ll let you look up. But I feel compelled to note that the Internet is a roomy place, with new stuff being added all the time. One more bullet point somewhere wouldn’t make the thing collapse.
Yet still I’m stuck, sans passport and all hope of escape. Despite all the English-speaking I do nowadays, though, my lifestyle is more Italian than ever: I am a grown woman living with my parents.
Except here, the ravioli are toasted.
Is this a great country or what?
