As I sit here on January 8, 2026, I’m waiting patiently (hmmm) for word on my Italian citizenship by marriage application.  Some lucky people in Italy receive their citizenship in less than a year after application, but the law says “within 24 months, unless of course we need more time and we can then extend it another 12 months” (highly paraphrased of course).  The waiting game has me contemplating just how we got here in the first place, so let’s reminisce!

March 2015

Spring Break road trips have their own particular logic. You point the car at something worth seeing, you figure out the details as you go, and you hope for the best.

Ours that year had an extra passenger (our AFS exchange student from Kanton Bern, experiencing the American Midwest for the first time) and a mission: swing through Chicago at the end to pick up Italian passports for my husband and our son before said son headed off to Belgium for his gap year with AFS. (Yes, the same program. I went to Switzerland with AFS in 1977. I volunteered with AFS for over 20 years. Our family is essentially an AFS franchise at this point.)

The Italian passport was a stroke of pure practicality. Our son was still under 18, which made getting him registered as an Italian citizen relatively straightforward — husband Joe’s nonno Giuseppe had done the groundwork, registering him in Borgotaro when he was born — and an Italian passport meant no visa hassle for Belgium. Appointments booked for two Zanrè passports. Road trip planned around it. Very much under control.

A couple of months before we left, we got a notice that the consulate was organizing a passport day in Denver. We could have handled the whole thing practically in our backyard.

Reader, we did not do that.

We had a road trip to run.

• Wyoming (apparently we found Lost Springs).
• Mount Rushmore.
• The Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.
• The Green Giant statue in Blue Earth, Minnesota.
• The Pearl Ice Cream Parlor in Lacrosse, Wisconsin.

All of which I watched our Bernese houseguest process in real time, with the particular expression of someone who has been told a thing exists but still cannot quite believe it. He was there to learn English, not to contemplate green statues and corn-based architecture, but America had other plans.

We made our way to Milwaukee to visit friends (and the Harley Davidson Museum), then pointed the car toward Chicago. Skyscrapers. The Italian Consulate. The passport. The satisfying conclusion.

You already know this didn’t go smoothly.

We did not have all the documents. Of course we didn’t.

The consulate official, to his enormous credit, did not turn us away (although he said he was sure “duecento percento” that he had told us exactly what to bring). Instead he proposed a solution of inspired pragmatism: he would hold Joe’s passport hostage while we drove back to Denver and FedExed him the missing documents.

We drove home. We FedExed the documents. One week later, both passports arrived.

What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: on our way out of that consulate, I was handed a cheerful little list of everything I would need to do to eventually become an Italian citizen myself.

Little did I know that piece of paper was the beginning of a ten-year project.

But that — as they say — è un’altra storia.