RENEWING OUR PERMESSI - PART 2

As I wrote PREVIOUSLY, keeping up with the bureaucracy required to live in a foreign country can be complicated and confusing. Now that our permits of stay are renewed through the mail, it's even more worrying, wondering if all the documents were acceptable, and wondering if everything arrived safely.

Luckily Italy is slowly coming into the digital age and it's now possible to check the status of renewals online. I checked after a week but found no information. I checked after two weeks and read that no irregularities had been found in our documents, and hoped that was good news. If it was just another way of saying that our documents had been received but hadn't yet been examined, then we'd still have to wait to see if anything changed. You know me, why wait to worry?!

Today, just three weeks after we mailed our renewal packets to Rome, I discovered that we have appointments for the next step! We're scheduled for September 1st, and even better, we get to go to Orvieto for the renewal! This will be six weeks after we mailed in our packets! What a relief! We were hoping that we'd be able to complete the renewal in Orvieto and not have to drive all the way to Terni. Although the drive might not be much longer, we enjoy Orvieto so much more than Terni, so we'll have a nice day out.

When we go to Orvieto for our appointment we'll have to take copies of our documents just in case they want to verify something. We'll also have to take four passport size photos, our original (ready-to-expire) permessi, and our passports. We'll also get re-fingerprinted, this time digitally, which won't be messy like the FIRST TIME, when our hands were covered with black ink.

I'm not sure if we'll receive our new permessi that day or if we'll have to wait until our fingerprints/photos are processed, but for now I'm just relieved to be one step closer to completing the process. The new permessi will be good for two years, so hopefully this will be the last time we have to go through this process! (Rumor has it the the system will change yet again, and that in the future each commune will handle their own permessi, but who knows when or if this will ever happen?)