The Value of Having a Piece of Paper With an Official Stamp

In my quest to be legally recognized by the Italian government — useful, since I live in Italy with my half-Italian husband — one of the things I have to do is present a document that shows when my name changed from Romie Stott (which I still use as a writer) to the married name Romie Faienza. That this document is my marriage license perplexes the city official who processes my paperwork, because it never says on the license that my name will henceforth be a different one, mainly because it didn’t have to be; plenty of American women don’t change their names.

The city official is skeptical because Italians don’t ever change their names when they marry. (Or have legally recognized middle names. On all Italian legal documents, my first name is therefore the two-word Romie Johanna.) However, this skepticism is something of a pose; she knows very well that Americans, and citizens of a number of other countries, like Greece, often have married names, and she possesses plenty of heavily-certified U.S. government documents, like my police report, which say that Romie Faienza is Romie Stott. However, those documents don’t prove that I am not withholding a name-change document separate from my marriage license (which presumably I am motivated to do purely for my own amusement).

Late one Saturday evening, about a week before I had to leave the country or violate my Schengen-area tourist visa (and about a month after I’d asked for help), I got an e-mail from the American Embassy in Rome: they would not send a letter to the Italian government attesting that I am the same person as myself, as the Italian government has requested. The embassy will not even testify that by American law a marriage certificate can be used as a name-changing document. It’s the embassy’s opinion that simply stating an American legal practice exists counts as legal advice, which they don’t do, even though this married name thing is a problem female American citizens in Italy experience constantly and it would be the work of a few minutes to draw up a form letter. However, if I’d like, I could book an appointment with a consular notary to swear to an affidavit that would have no legal force outside of America, so that I would have a piece of paper with stamps on it.

It’s hard to explain, if it’s not immediately obvious, the value of having a piece of paper with stamps on it. Suffice to say, although I brought almost no personal possessions to Italy, I did bring sealing wax, in acknowledgment of its totemic importance. Nobody here wants to call the Americans to verify that anything I say about myself is real. They want a piece of paper that looks extremely official, official enough that if I’m fooling them they can say to another person higher up the chain that the document looked convincing, and have the other person nod. I’m sympathetic to this approach, because I don’t like to call the Americans either.

(I’m in my 30s, and lived abroad as a kid, so I remember when American embassies used to be cool. That’s when we were fighting the cold war, and thought it was worth spending a lot of money to promote American culture. Although that strategy worked, we have more recently decided to go another direction.)

Rome did not have any available notarial appointments before I had to leave the country, so at 6:30 a.m. on Monday, I boarded the earliest bus to Naples. One advantage of my lack of Italian residency is that I don’t belong to a specific consular district, and am therefore allowed to bother all of them.

ARPA bus from Pescara to Naples: €24

Metro train from Piazza Garibaldi to Mergellina: €1.20

One way transit time — 4 hours 35 minutes, making me five minutes late for my notarial appointment. The guards at the gate didn’t care. However, I was flustered enough that I shut my finger in a heavy and complicated locking mechanism.

Medical treatment: €0, because I’m sucking it up. However, if I choose to take aspirin, it’s 50 cents an aspirin. Aspirin is inexplicably pricey here, and hard to buy in packs larger than 20. You can, however, buy a range of aspirin companion pills that promise to protect your stomach from the aspirin.

The interior of the American consulate in Naples is uninspired. I guess it looks like America, in that its floors are beige linoleum, its lights are fluorescent tubes, the chairs are stackable metal and plastic, and there’s a TV on the wall playing CNN. The color saturation of the TV is not correctly adjusted, so all the reporters look like they have the flu.

Since I was swearing a document for the benefit of the Italian government, I quite sensibly wrote it in Italian. I felt confident about doing this because speaking about myself in the present tense is one of the things I’m good at, and because I found this document on the consulate website that I could build from, and because literally everyone at the consulate can speak at least passable Italian. As far as I can tell, it’s a requirement of employment.

Absolutely not, said the consulate, through very thick glass with a speaker in it. We will only notarize documents in English.

Me: But America has no official language, and as an American I have a legal right to give testimony in whatever language I find most comfortable for that purpose. Also, you speak Italian.

Clerk: Look, we only notarize English. That’s our thing.

Me: How come? All you’re doing is stamping that I said a thing in front of you. I’m saying this thing. In front of you. In a language which in fact you understand perfectly, not that it’s relevant. You asked me at the beginning of this conversation whether I’d rather speak English or Italian.

Clerk: Please write it again in English and we will give you the very fanciest stamps available. Stamps that will knock their eyes out! They won’t even need a translation because they will no longer be able to see, they will be so dazzled by stamps. I’m going to do an embossed one here, and then the vice consul is going to initial inside it, just watch.

I brought up the website — their very own website — and they didn’t believe me about the sample bilingual sworn statement. I couldn’t show them on my phone, because my phone and my kindle were confiscated by security before I entered the building in case they were spy cameras. I could see I wasn’t going to get any traction, so I handwrote another affidavit in beautiful cursive penmanship (although not calligraphy, because I didn’t want to upstage the embossing) and waited for the vice consul.

Vice Consul: Is this in English?

Me: Does it have to be?

Vice Consul: Yes, although I’m not going to read it.

Me: Look seriously why not Italian; I could use Italian on American soil, which this is.

Vice Consul: Please raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear…

I raised my hand in front of an American flag which was smaller than I hoped it would be, and promised I wasn’t currently impersonating myself, even though I have at least once played a fictionalized version of me in a feature film. Then we signed and stamped and initialed a commemorative document.

Consular notarial services: €48, the equivalent of $50.

Eventual cost for an Italian to swear to the translation: €16 stamp duty (I’m not kidding about stamps) plus lost wages (you have to wait for the judge, sometimes all day), because Italy does have an official language and there is no way they’ll accept untranslated English.

Then I got lunch at a tourist trap near the bus station, where they overcharged me €1.50 in the hope my Italian was too bad to argue the bill. It was a kind of pathetic gambit on their part, because no matter how bad my Italian is or isn’t, I can count, and when I see four list items after I ordered three things, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. (Tax isn’t listed separately on Italian restaurant bills, nor are there typically gratuities or eating-in fees.) It was pathetic enough I just let them have the money. I managed to not yell at a vice consul, so I wasn’t about to yell at a waiter.

Metro train from to Mergellina to Piazza Garibaldi: €1.20

Lunch: €9

ARPA bus from Naples to Pescara: €24

I got home at 6:50 p.m. I had left that morning at 5:50 a.m. However, I’m going to assume no monetary opportunity cost for those 13 hours, because I could in theory have written on the bus (although I used the time to catch up on sleep and read some science fiction), and the internet-dependent editorial work I’ve been doing is deferred payment deferred to maybe never. (It’s for my best friend.)

The commute from Pescara to Naples was about the same as Boston to New York, or Dallas to Austin — both runs I’ve had to courier to get legal okays in the U.S. — so although I’d never been to Naples, the whole thing felt very familiar; tourist trap included, it was maybe the most American experience I’ve had in Italy.

Total Cost of a fancy piece of paper which may or may not impress the Italian government: €123.40 times 1.03 (because my American bank — the Bank of America — charges me a 3% foreign transaction fee every time I use my card, including in a nominally in-network ATM or when I pay in dollars) = €127.10

Postscript:

The evening I returned from Naples, I was informed by the Italian Embassy in Washington that the reason I’ve had so much trouble getting a long-stay spousal visa while I wait for my residency is I don’t need one and they therefore don’t exist. As long as I’m traveling with an Italian-passport-holding husband (or parent, or child), that passport is my visa, under not only Italian but E.U. law. I am, essentially, carry-on luggage. I ought to apply for residency (the permesso to which my affidavit applies) so that I can travel solo, and belong to the health service, and participate in gainful employment, but in effect I can remain a tourist indefinitely — a kind of Supertourist, since I’m not required to prove my financial stability or carry insurance (although I really, really ought to). If I’m challenged by a border control official at the airport, I should demand the case be referred to the Italian police.

I met with the Italian police, the immigration officials, the next morning, and they agreed with the Italian Embassy. However, just to be careful, in case someone uninformed tried to stop me from getting back in the country after my trip to the States (I already had the plane ticket), the police suggested I carry a lot of documents. Fancy documents. We made an appointment to meet again after the holidays, officially so we can begin my permesso-to-citizenship process, but unofficially so that I can carry a letter from the Pescara police department that says they want me here, and anyone who interferes with my ability to attend this appointment is impeding their important policework.

The police did not immediately give me the letter. They asked me to pick it up the following afternoon.

They wanted time to make it look official.

Romie Stott’s genre-bending fiction and poetry have appeared in Arc, Farrago’s Wainscot, Strange Horizons, Punchnel’s, Dark Mountain, and LIT. As a filmmaker, she’s been a guest artist at the National Gallery (London), ICA Boston, and Dallas Museum of Art. Her online portfolio is at romiesays.tumblr.com.

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