Sicily: Balestrate Official Resident

Yesterday I became an official resident of the town of Balestrate for the limited purpose of getting a permission to sojourn for Christopher. This document is granted under the authority of the Commune de Balestrate, run by the inimitable Dr. ssa Efemia Lo' Grasso. The women who run the Commune de Balestrate (and they are all women, except for the police who are mostly men) struggle to work with dot matrix printers, manual type-writters and worn out computers resting on wooden pallets. They are responsible for the same sort of municipal operations as you would expect for a small Canadian city, but also include responsibility for police and social assistance and some uniquely Italian paperwork which they have the power to grant, such as my 'iscrizone anagrafica'.

Then, with that success, we attempted to get Christopher his long sought 'permisso di sojourno'. Essentially permission to stay in Italy and thus the Schengen zone beyond the 90 limit set for Canadians. The Schengen zone includes most of the EU and a few non-EU members. We had gone to the Questura in Palermo before, and met the world's busiest man, but found that the Questura in Partinico, a small city near us also has the power to grant the permisso, so we went to Partinico.

There is an invisible office, entry to which is controlled by Vitos the Cerebus of the Partinico Questura. After a 45 minute wait, during which we met a number of Italians, who were also waiting for documents, we did gain entry. It was somewhat reassuring that everyone was stuck waiting standing around on the sidewalk - no preferential treatment for anyone.

In the end we didn't get the permissio. We did get an appointment to come back again in September. We had almost all the paper work necessary. We are missing a translation of our Northwest Territories marriage certificate into Italian certified and stamped by the Italian Ambassador to Canada. You read that correctly - the Italian Ambassador to Canada (in Ottawa) needs to translate, certify and stamp our marriage certificate then mail it back to us here in Italy. We are required to pay the Italian Ambassador $12.50 in cash and include a self addressed stamped envelope to return the certified copies.  Or, at least that is what I think we are supposed to do. Sigh. I should mention that we would never have gotten even to this stage if not for the excellent assistance of Elizabeth Fraser, who translated our documents, liaised with the Commune de Balestrate and advised us about what we'd need to bring to the Questura.