Italy: Sailing through red tape in Rome

Susan Spano’s Postcards From Rome

I had to go to an Italian Ministry of the Economy office to get a codice fiscale. That’s an official identification number needed to open a bank account in Rome.

I put it off as long as I could because it’s too hot here to deal with bureaucracy and because the Agenzia delle Entrate office I needed to visit is in an unprepossessing part of Trastevere, near where the Porta Portese flea market takes place on Sunday morning. But it was costing me $50 a month to transfer my rent money from a U.S. bank to my Italian landlady. So before I could open an account here, I had to get a codice fiscale.

When I first went to the Agenzia delle Entrate, it was packed with people sitting on metal chairs or smoking on the sidewalk. There was a ticket dispenser issuing numbers that flashed on a screen when your turn came up. But first I got the appropriate form and was told to come back to file it because the office closed at 12:45 on Monday.

Anticipating a line the next day, I showed up 45 minutes before the office opened. A handful of people were already there, including a friendly young woman who pointed to wire near the door on which scraps of paper with hand-written numbers were pinned, a jury-rigged ticket dispenser she had devised to make sure that, when the office opened, people entered on a first-come, first-served basis.

And they say Rome is chaotic.

I took No. 15 and waited. More people came and were advised to take numbers. Then, just before the office opened, the woman who had instituted the system told everybody to line up, in accordance with the numbers they’d taken. Almost everyone complied, except for a man in a fishing vest and a couple with a baby who started arguing with her about the system. I didn’t catch all of what they said, but the altercation got heated. When they started shaking their fists at each other, I wondered whether I’d landed in the middle of a Roman riot.

But then the grate opened, people filed into the office decorously, took new numbers from the official dispenser and waited to be called. I only had to sit there for 30 minutes before I got a codice fiscale, as easy as that, without any of the bureaucratic harassment that made it take months for me to get a carte de sejour when I lived in France. Plus, the office was air-conditioned.

Italian bureaucracy runs smoothly in its own nutty way, I decided. And when it doesn’t there’s a Roman matron around to address the problem.

Now I have a codice fiscale and will soon see what I have to go through to get a bank account.

— Susan Spano, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

[Photo: Susan Spano / Los Angeles Times]

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 1:06 pm by Susan Spano and is filed under Europe, Italy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.