We left you all hanging on the outcome of our visa application. In spite of all our best efforts to be thoroughly prepared, our meeting with the visa officer at the consulate’s office did not go well, and our application was deemed “insufficient”. The problem was our rental contract, which was between us and a Houston friend for his home in Sicily. We had downloaded a generic rental agreement, filled in our specifics, and this was signed and dated by all parties. Perfectly legal and legitimate in the United States.  But the visa officer wanted us to provide an Italian contract, registered and notarized in Italy.

Um, what??????  None of the parties are in Italy, so how are we supposed to do that? Just all fly over to Italy for a day and sign a contract there? There was a period of hope when we thought we might be able to have our contract validated at the home of the Consul General here in Houston, but that did not happen either.

We are left with few choices. It’s too late to try to adopt an Italian child, or to enroll in school there. Rather, we have decided to withdraw our visa applications and go to Italy anyway. We will try to stay under the radar with only our passports. Italy has a well established pattern of relaxed immigration enforcement, especially when you are American tourists, so odds are they won’t even notice we are there. If worse comes to worse and they limit us to ninety days, we’ll bounce out of Italy for a few weeks, to a non-Schengen country (Croatia is supposed to be beautiful!), and then bounce back in time to be with the girls for Christmas back in Italy. Now the only hurdle left is to get our passports back from the consulate’s office: How hard could that be? I don’t dare even ask.