To be an Italian expat is a Kafkaesque Situation
Updated: Aug 18
Italy is mine and it owes me a living... and a passport for going to the United Kingdom.
I could blame the UK for the ill-advised vote for Brexit, which, in the end, caused more problems than offering solutions to the UK citizens and, moreover, punished European citizens who worked and paid taxes in the UK, but who had temporary contracts (their bosses, as in Italy or in France, preferring a system of short-term contrats periodically renewed) and thus they were compelled to leave the Country after Brexit; but I have to blame Italy even more, because of the way the Italian government treats citizens who had to leave their own Country in order to find a job elsewhere.
To be an Italian expat is not just painful in itself, but it implies an additional burden and an extra charge in terms of bureaucracy which lead to every kind of Kafkaesque situations.
Below, Relativity (1953), litograph print by Maurits Cornelis Escher.
"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate" (Dante, Divina Commedia, Inferno, Canto III). Source for the whole Canto here.
Below, a modern illustration of Dante's verse I quoted above: screenshots from the Web platform Prenot@mi, i. e., the 2.0. version of Hell's Door.
Since last October (ten months now!), I get the same response every time, at whatever hour in the day or in the night I try to find a date for an appoinment. There is no calendar with few dates to choose: just the button "prenota" (book) and, whenever I click on it, the automatic window "no more places available for the service chosen" immediately appears and all I can do is just clicking on the "OK" button... but it is not OK at all to be treated this way.
Google offer a rich anthology of authentic and trustworthy comments about the Italian Consulate and in particular about the hellish Prenot@mi platform, the monster spawn by the Italian government in order to troll and to abuse Italian expats, whose majority (like me) are expats because Italy did not and still do not offer anything to its young citizens. How many generations of Italians will be obliged to emigrate because the politicians do not care about us?
In fact, as an expat, I belong to Nowhere and this situation reminds me this scene from Charlie Chaplin's movie A King in New York (1957) with Chaplin and his son Michael.
Vera da Pozzo
17th August 2026
(C) Vera da Pozzo
(C) Italy is Mine
(C) Italy is Mine and It owes Me a Living
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