Dear Eric,
A picture is worth a thousand words, but I fear the sunrise over our beautiful pool doesn’t quite convey our anxiety that we may never actually start construction on the main house. As we all were warned by everyone before beginning this project, Italian bureaucracy is a complex and intricate system that would remind anyone of the scene in Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy when Arthur Dent is trying to prevent the demolition of Earth and tries to fill out the proper form for the Vogons and they keep telling him that he doesn’t have the proper form and he needs to fill out more and more forms and eventually he misses his deadline to start renovating his house and starts with the pool instead.
I may have mixed my metaphors there, but you know what I am talking about. We submitted our permits in July, and then August came, which is the month that Italy goes on vacation. We are culturally sensitive folks, so this was no problem, but come September we learned that somehow over the course of the summer, the entire office that approves permits for these projects was unstaffed. Just, no staff. Some were on vacation, some had left work permanently. Regardless, we all did our best to go down there and figure out what was going on. Eventually we were assured someone was looking at our permits. Not that they would work on them, of course, just that they had seen that the application existed.
It is now November. We await with bated breath the arrival of our permits. We were recently told that if we email the office, they legally have 30 days to reply, so they don’t actually have to answer us in a timely fashion. And we are at liberty to escalate, but the escalation bureau then has 40 days to reply. Really, if you compare it to the entire composition of time and space, it’s a very reasonable timeline.
In unrelated news, I asked someone ‘how do you say I have an ulcer’ in Italian, and they complimented me on my pronunciation and didn’t even mention when I passed out from anxiety. Apparently they are also used to Italian bureaucracy.
Anyway, we have crossed our fingers and touched iron to ward off any bad luck, so hopefully our next update is one that has fewer explanations of how easy it is to leave a permit office unstaffed for months at a time.
Ciao!
Roxanne
