My wife and I are currently in the process of getting citizenship with the intention of relocating from the United States to Italy. I will detail my family lineage and link it here once I have done so, but at the moment, my citizenship process is well underway. To be completely transparent, I have been using ITAMCAP with their full-service citizenship assistance program. I will detail my experience with them in a future post and link here when I have done so.
Background
I qualify for citizenship by descent (jure sanguinis). Specifically, my dad’s mother (my paternal grandmother) was first generation born in America. If you’ve done any research on citizenship, you may have come across or heard of the “1948 rule”. I won’t go into it but my grandmother was not subjected to the 1948 rule.
So, I have a clear path to citizenship by my wife does not. We also have a blended family with three boys – two from my wife’s previous marriage and one from mine – so that adds another degree of difficulty. We do plan on taking our youngest (wife’s biological child) with us. My wife plans to get a “digital nomad” visa but we still need to research what that means for our son.
What do we want to do or accomplish by moving to Italy?
As we have moved closer to the milestone of obtaining citizenship, my wife and I have become more and more eager to physically relocate to Italy which brought up an interesting question:
Can we move before we (or even just myself) become citizens?
According to our representatives at ITAMCAP, this article from The Florentine, and other informational resources my wife has uncovered with some googling Google-Fu, the short answer is “yes“. The most attractive bullet point amongst all of the information that we could find is that getting citizenship while living in Italy typically moves faster and to add to it, the general consensus is that smaller comuni can move the most quickly since there are simple less applications and situations to work through.
Considerations and concerns we have regarding up and moving our lives to Italy.
- Can we keep our US-based jobs when we move?
- What kind of housing should we consider?
- What status to our children have when we move?
- How do we get our fur (and feather) babies across the pond?
- Get a driving permit in the US that allows us to drive in Italy which can only be gotten in the US.
- Can we (and should we) take our cars?
- What do we do with our investments?
Can we keep our US-based jobs when we move?
It depends. I know that is an ambiguous and not at all a helpful answer but I’ll break it down in respect to myself and my wife.
For me, I cannot stay employed as though I were still living in the US. My current employer is smaller, has no international presence and is not set up to accommodate an international employee. It boils down to taxes, international regulations and other hoops they would have to jump through. However, I am trying to stay on as a contractor and keep my same responsibilities (as well as rate of pay).
Planning for our initial trip to Italy.
We plan to scout out places before we ultimately decide where we are going to live for the foreseeable future.
What kind of visa will we need when to have when we move, assuming we aren’t yet citizens?
In my case, since my citizenship application will be in process, I will not need a visa.
Ancillary considerations once we get there.
We have Verizon phones now, what cell carrier do we get when we get there?
How do our US-based credit cards work when we get there?
Places we are considering to live in Italy.
My family is from Sicily and never really considered living anywhere else at the outset of this endeavor. However,
- Sicily
- Salerno
- Abrruzo region
How do we get our shit there?
A question we have found ourselves asking that is way more involved than we anticipated is “what are we going to take with us?”. This leads into a much more finite question of “what do we really need?”.
Skipping past the emotional connection of my wife’s sewing and knitting machines and materials, my drums, my massive 3D printing arsenal, we really need to analyze what we really need to take with us.
How do we ship stuff? My bike – should I talk to Gemini and have them ship it?
How do we get the stuff we want over to Italy? Store it at Dad’s house then have it packed and shipped? What shipping company do we use?
https://internationalmoving.com
https://www.sdcinternationalshipping.com
How much money should we realistically have allocated before we go?
What does schooling look like for a 16 year old kid?
How do we get the pups and the birdies there?
We need to learn more about what quarantining the birds means.
How do we learn the language?
Reaching out to (distant) family in Italy.
More to come
This page will develop a lot in the coming weeks and months. Right now, I’m using it as a ‘placeholder’ of sorts to document what we learn, as we go.