Moving to Italy (The Genesis)
To Do List:
✅ Become an amateur genealogist
Like all good stories, this one begins with an impulse to sell all of our belongings and move overseas. Well, I suppose not all good stories start that way, but this one certainly does.
Let’s delve into the timeline at the present moment and then I’ll circle back to how we got here. Yesterday, I opened our mailbox to see a beat up yellow envelope with the stamp for Comune Di Montedoro on it. Inside was the final piece(s) to a proverbial puzzle I had started piecing together almost a full year prior. This travel weary little envelope contained the certified copies of my husbands Great Grandfathers birth certificate that I had requested from the comune in Montedoro, Sicily back in November. Those innocuous sheets of paper are an invaluable labor of love, and not to wax poetic, but they’re a symbol of completion. In actuality, what they truly are, are the final certified documents that we needed for our application for Jure Sanguinis Italian Citizenship. Their arrival marks the end of my work on this little “project”. From this point on I can relinquish control to our service provider in Italy and enjoy the rest of the ride.
BEHOLD
The final piece to our citizenship puzzle
Man, let me tell you - it has been a ✨PROCESS✨.
We made the decision to move abroad a few years ago. And as it tends to go, as soon as we committed to the decision it seemed as if we immediately encountered a multitude of previously unimaginable roadblocks, which kicked off in spectacularly dramatic fashion with a global pandemic. Followed immediately by office closures, then visa issues, etc, etc, etc… We were faced with a seemingly endless series of unfortunate events that led to (what felt like) monthly pivots and regroups in our attempt to find a viable way to get to Europe. Last January we finally opted to dig a little into our Italian citizenship eligibility not knowing at that point that what I was really doing was delving into a year of aggressive genealogy and documentation collection as well as all the notarizing, apostilling and translations that come with that.
Ultimately this route, while tedious and all consuming, turned out to a much better path for us than any visa ever would have been - because, at its completion, we’ll have EU citizenship (as will our girls and their kids should they choose to have any) which has amazing benefits for us. The most notable benefit being visa free living and traveling in Europe.
This undertaking was incredibly interesting and I learned so much while working through the process. I am pretty proud of myself for seeing it through from inception to completion and now that the paperwork portion is complete I’m looking forward to watching this chapter evolve into the adventure that I’m sure it will be! So today, in honor of the arrival of the final puzzle piece, I’m going to kick back with a spritz and brainstorm how I want to document my experiences and the experiences to come.
Feel free to come along for the ride via the unstructured mutterings of one who hast no idea what she’s doing (spoiler alert: that one is me. I am the one who hast no idea what she’s doing).
My beloved document binder
Side note: never would I have imagine a $4 black target binder being my most valued possession and the sole focus of my borderline unhealthy obsession, but the pride that I have in this binders’ care and organization is truly unhinged.
