RENEWING OUR PERMITS OF STAY - PART 2.75

Almost there! Yes, we're inching closer and closer to actually having our renewed permits of stay, or permessi di sogiorno, in our hands. Our scheduled appointment on Monday didn't go quite as planned, but all things considered it was just a tiny blip.

We drove the 45 minutes to Orvieto for our 9:45 appointment to turn in current photographs and be digitally fingerprinted. Although we'd been fingerprinted the old fashioned way when we first arrived, Italy is slowly coming into the digital age, so we needed to be digitally fingerprinted for our latest renewal.

We'd been warned to bring copies of all the documents we submitted with our renewal forms: bank statements, proof of home ownership, and our passports.
We also brought along the registered letter we'd received telling us the day and time of our appointment. No one had mentioned that we'd also need a copy of that letter to us, and apparently everyone else who was there for the same purpose didn't know either. We made a nice little parade back and forth between the questura and the copy store!

Unfortunately the digital finger printer decided to take the day off. Calls were made to Terni and yes, they were having the same problems. We took a short walk and returned to find that the system was still off-line. We waited until the office closed at 12:30 but it never did come back up. We asked if we should return the next day and of course the three Italians working at the questura looked shocked and doubtful. They raised their eyebrows and said "Who knows if it will be working tomorrow?"

The woman who'd been helping us gave us a card with their phone numbers and told us to call in the morning before we drove the winding road from
San Venanzo. She told us we could call as early as 8:30, so the next morning that's just what we did. A man answered the phone but he obviously didn't work in the office. He told me to call back at 9:30 but I explained what had happened yesterday and that we'd been told to call early. "Okay", he said, "try back in a little while."

About ten minutes later, just as we were getting ready to call again, the phone rang and it was the woman from the questura! She said everything was working today so we told her we'd see her soon and jumped in the car. Once we arrived in Orvieto there was someone at the window where the fingerprints are done, but after just a few minutes we were called in. The process was quick and simple...digital fingerprints of each finger of both hands, then one additional print of our right index finger and we were done! We were probably there a total of ten minutes!

The clerk told us to call in about 2 1/2 months to see if our permessi, now done like a credit card, rather than the full size piece of paper, are ready for pickup. After that we'll be good for another two years, by which time we'll probably have sold our house and be back in the states. And if not, the process will probably have changed so we'll have it figure it out all over again!