Legal Affairs
DEALING WITH RED TAPE IN ITALY Guide to help expats navigate their way through Italian bureaucracy Geoffrey Watson Smith as you always thought, you are Smith John.
Many expats protest about bureaucracy in Italy, but let’s be fair: this scourge exists in every society. And as more and more forms need to be filled in online, with computers rejecting our answers and unable to understand our attempts to tell them who we are, frustration can quickly build up.
It is tempting to object that nobody would think to refer to the president of the republic as Mattarella Sergio, but there it is – we’re supposed to introduce ourselves that way. To be fair, it probably makes a lot more sense for a long list of schoolkids’ parents or newsletter subscribers to be sorted with all the Rossis together rather than all the Giovannas.
Here’s a brief guide to how to talk to computers (and unfriendly officials) who ask us who we are – be it to open a bank account, apply for an identity card, or simply start any official enquiry in Italy.
In Italy it is relatively unusual for people to have more than one separate forename (although joined-up combinations like Giampaolo are not uncommon). So the space available for forenames on forms is usually fairly restricted. Members of the British royal family would certainly not be able to cram all their multiple forenames into an Italian form.
As in most other countries, we are almost always required to provide our name and date and place of birth before the conversation can get started. Simple, no? Well, not always… Name You would think this was the easiest part, but that’s not always the case. In Italy, for official use, the correct format is surname (family name) followed by forename(s) – once known as Christian names. Yes, it makes you feel like a prisoner or a defendant in court, but you are not John
Even if you are forced to cut off – even in the middle of a name – when the space has run out, ensure that you provide as much of your full name as you find room for: officials (and computers) will be tolerant if you run out of space, but will usually look askance at somebody
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