Codice Fiscale – Easy when you know how!

So after all that, getting a codice fiscale proved to as easy as something-very-easy-but-tedious-all-the-same.

What you need is to find the Uffizio di Entrata, literally the “Office of Entry”, part of the Finance Ministry, because this is where you get to enter into the Italian system.  In Catania there was a “pre-information desk” where a helpful lady gave me the correct form to fill in and pointed me to the photocopier to knock off a copy of my passport.

The form proved easy to fill out, and after waiting almost two hours for my number to come up, we presented ourselves to an extremely nice lady who chattered about Ireland, foreigners in Italy, how sweet Sonia is, and about 10 other topics which had nothing to do with getting a codice-fiscale (if she engaged in similar wandering conversations with every applicant, that explains the long waiting times!).  At the end of which, she gave me a print-out with my codice on it!

Wow, that was easy.

Sonia demands that I admit that it was easier than it was in Dublin, where she was actually subjected to some fairly probing questions about why she was in Ireland, which I forgot about when I wrote that post last week. 

So here goes – it’s easier in Italy to get a codice fiscale than it is getting a PPS Number in Ireland – as long as you can find the correct office!

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Not a total disaster

Following on from my last post about the murky world of Italian bureaucracy, Sonia went down to the Comune in Catania to ask there – reasonably thinking that they handle more foreigners in Catania than in Gravina, where we are.  And sure enough, while the €5,000-in-an-Italian-bank-account is an unmovable rock, the other “2” in this catch-22 wasn’t – a codice fiscale can be obtained from the Foreigners Office of some vague Italian goverment agency.  So it’s down to them first thing tomorrow morning to see what the story is.

The moral of this story is to not take the word of a single bureaurcrat in the huge system of the Italian state.  Treat Italian bureaucrats like a bad diagnosis – always get a second (and third, and fourth) opnion.

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