In November 2022, I started the application process for my residence visa -- to which I am automatically entitled as the spouse of an Italian citizen. Yesterday (a full nine months into the process), my visa identification card was finally ready. (And this is only because we have retained the services of an immigration attorney -- without her help, we would be completely stymied.) The bureaucracy of the Italian Immigration Service is such that I actually at one point found myself wishing for the efficiency and orderliness of the Post Office. I mean, at the Post Office, when your number is called and you get to go up to the teller, you can never do whatever mail-related thing it is that you had wanted to do, but at least you get to go up and be told to fuck off in a systematic progression.

After milling around in a mob of others outside the Police Station in Forte dei Marmi for over an hour, we finally just snuck in on the heels of some Russian oligarchs who had arrived after us and were having none of this waiting-until-you're-called shit, but just pushed their way right in. Russian oligarchs do not stand around patiently in the heat. 

The actual handing over of the card itself took only five minutes and then we ran back to our car which was overparked by that point. I thought that getting the car towed would have been the icing on the bureaucratic cake, but that did not happen.

Instead, when we got home and I looked at the card itself, the real icing appeared. I was only given a one-year visa instead of the four-year visa that I should have been granted. And the one year starts from the time of my initial application -- nine months ago. So now I get to immediately begin the process all over again. In the meantime, until a new visa is actually granted to me (presumably about nine months from now), if I leave the country of Italy, there is every probability that I would not be allowed back in.

Fortunately, there are worse places to be trapped. There are certainly colder places.