Lies at the Start
The idea of obtaining a residence permit in Italy came to us after the 1998 crisis. Somehow it suddenly became alarming: what if everything collapses here, the communists return?.. That summer we happened to be vacationing with the whole family. Our child had an allergy, and we were advised to go not to the sea, but to some lakes. We chose Italy, Lake Garda - a lake in Lombardy. We liked it very much - a gorgeous, simply heavenly place. Returning home, we came across an advertisement: a certain firm offered, for quite reasonable money and quickly enough, to help with obtaining a residence permit in Italy. Moreover, the lawyer offering these services was based in the city of Brescia - 10 km from that wonderful lake where we vacationed. Besides, Olga, my wife, knows Italian... Everything fell into place. And we got carried away.
Theoretically, obtaining a residence permit (RP) in Italy is not a particularly complicated process. It works like this: you get a three-month visa - which gives you the right to register your company - which automatically gives you the right to work and allows you to hire yourself as a sole manager - who is then granted the residence permit. To register a company, you need to have authorized capital, some funds in a bank account. These amounts are constantly growing: over the three or four years we have been doing this, they have risen significantly - by three or four times. In addition, you need to have a residence, that is, buy an apartment or rent it for a long term - no less than six years.
These are the basic conditions. But there are also many nuances that require the help of a local lawyer - it is hardly possible to do without one. At first, we were helped by a former compatriot - either from Russia or from Ukraine. He left for Italy during perestroika and was a typical con artist. He drank a lot of blood from everyone we know: he lied, constantly missed deadlines - the promised 30 days for processing turned into six months, and so on. Psychologically, dealing with him was very difficult. Not just for us - all clients of this firm ran into deception: the advertising promised one thing, but in reality it turned out quite differently. It is clear that an enterprise called 'emigration' is not a cheap affair, and accordingly, the clients of this lawyer are busy people, all with companies that cannot be left for long. You go for a week - after all, he promised! - and you get stuck for two months. This was extremely annoying - and not everyone could stand it; many dropped out of the race.
Moreover, we could not wrap our heads around the fact that a residence permit is not a one-time 'acquisition' - you get it and live; it must be constantly tended to and maintained, and that means ongoing expenses of money and time. Some gave up, realizing that the game was not worth the candle. We are continuing our marathon: we like it there too much, and we hope that our son will someday study there. But if a person does not have far-reaching plans, does not intend to settle in that place, then maintaining a residence permit may turn out to be unprofitable. Perhaps the only advantage of this status is the ability to travel without visas to European countries. Well, how many times a year will you go to Europe? Five? Six? Let's say each visa costs $200. Per year, that's only $1,000-1,200. But maintaining a residence permit in Italy will cost several tens of thousands of dollars. If you actually do business in Italy, then opening your own local company gives you certain advantages compared to our firm working with Italy directly. But it must be a sufficiently serious business that would cover all overhead costs. And one more important circumstance: your Italian company must be somehow connected with the field in which you operate at home. Our family is only now beginning to see the first timid outlines of such production 'harmony.' We cannot even think about self-sufficiency yet.
When thinking about immigrating to Italy, you should immediately consider your options for a business there - so that such radical changes in life pay off. If you don't have a business connected with an already established domestic one, you can start a trading business - again, with the homeland - or engage in purchasing commercial real estate and renting out apartments or offices.
Actually, similar schemes for obtaining a residence permit operate in many European countries. But, as far as we know, in Spain, say, the requirements are stricter; in England, your company must create jobs for Britons; but in the Czech Republic the scheme is indeed similar, although, we've heard, recently the Czechs have become more demanding.
Who lives in this tower?
In Italy, immigration processes are relatively young. Previously, their immigration law was called anti-immigration. Italy rejected foreigners. Then a severe demographic crisis broke out - since the 1970s there has been no population growth at all, the nation is aging, and the birth rate is extremely low. They had to open the doors slightly and gradually let foreigners in. While some departments give the green light for entry, others rack their brains over how to organize this entry. Nigerians are let in in exchange for oil quotas, Pakistanis - in exchange for something else, Moroccans, Albanians - on some other terms favorable to the country. It is believed that Moroccans control the transport sector, Albanians - the construction business. But we do not see such Albanians; we see Albanians who beg on every corner. We also do not see Moroccans employed in the transport sector; instead we see Moroccan waiters.
The place where we live, or rather, are registered, is the province of Brescia, named after the largest city in the Lombardy region. This is a very rich and very industrial region. Here is the second largest machine-building center in Italy, although the population of Brescia is about 200,000 people. And since Italians do not rush to production, 'to the machines,' it is the non-white immigrants who work hard there - there are very many of them in the city.
It is hard to say how local residents feel about the change in the ethnic composition of the population - after all, we are not locals either, we are also immigrants, just of a different color. We did not notice openly negative attitudes, clearly expressed hostility, let alone aggression, but it is unlikely that native residents are delighted by the influx of aliens. It is believed that, for example, Albanians brought with them crime, unheard-of and previously unseen crimes...
Our impressions of dealing with officials at various levels are the brightest. We easily arrange all our affairs with a few visits to the chamber of commerce: you come, take a number, go to an official, if the service is paid - you pay, if not - you quickly get the necessary certificate, and that's that. Customs has nothing in common with ours; it has completely different functions, and there no one will ever mock people. The role of an official in Italian business is minimized. We don't have some super business; we don't need to coordinate anything with Berlusconi - we don't trade oil, we don't import gas. What do we need? To buy fabric, shoes. Paid, sent - and all that...
As long as the company operates - pays taxes, submits all required financial reports, and its manager lives in the country, that is, rents housing here or resides in purchased housing - the residence permit is extended. First it is issued for a year, then for two, then for another five, and after the second five-year period one can already obtain citizenship.
All these years both the business and the residence must be in order. Naturally, one must live in the country permanently. We do not do this, but so far no one has caught us at this misdeed.
We suspect that in this province exactly as many people live with our status as the number of clients that very immigration lawyer managed to find and retain. And no special mechanism of control and verification has been invented for us. It should be noted that, unlike Moroccans, Albanians, or Nigerians, who enter the country as refugees and immediately go on welfare, we do not ask anyone for anything - on the contrary, we regularly pay taxes, buy decent cars, go to restaurants. In short, we create no problems for the country, no trouble from us - so why keep an eye on us?
Say, we were not in Italy during the population census. Upon returning, we learned that we had been deprived of residence - registration. We were very scared, but when we went to the appropriate institution and explained that we had been on a business trip, the female official apologized to us for half an hour and instantly restored our rights.
Languages are dead, useless. And - necessary
Probably, there is no need to say that in Italy without the Italian language you are nowhere. I am a self-critical person (Olga) and do not claim to have perfect command of the language. But I can speak on any topic - from banking and commercial to everyday: renting housing, buying a car. In all these areas I had to bustle, and each time I prepared accordingly - I learned terms. I had a grammar base from my institute years, but I built up my vocabulary already in the process of life. Most compatriots who follow the same path as we do do not know the language and do not learn it, and when they are pressed, they simply hire an interpreter. English there is just as useless as Russian. That is, in a hotel or restaurant, with English it is still okay, but already, say, at the post office, no one will speak to you in English...
That hapless lawyer, whom we have already mentioned, plays precisely on the fact that clients do not know Italian at all and therefore are afraid of everything. In the end, he will obtain a residence permit, but he will fleece a lot of money for it, and the whole procedure will take a huge amount of time - much more than was promised.
We parted ways with him long ago and hired a certified accountant who helps us run the company's affairs, prepare reports, and represents us before tax authorities. This is a normal practice for Europe. A large company can afford to hire a certified accountant, but a small one cannot, and it turns to some accounting firm that provides accounting services for many companies at once.
In Lombardy, the level of general culture is very high, incomparable with ours. This is the north of the country and, as they say, it also cannot be compared with the south. Rudeness is absent here - both as a phenomenon and as a style. I can, of course, judge only by my own experience, and personally I have encountered exceptional and universal friendliness, a desire and readiness to help. Did I want to live there permanently? Without work it is difficult, because a circle of acquaintances appears precisely in the process of work - otherwise you cannot acquire one. But our work can only be connected with our own country. Opening your own firm and doing business only in Italy is unrealistic: everything there is occupied, scheduled, snapped up. Opening a store and competing with Italians in selling pasta or shoes is ridiculous. Or a restaurant, a hotel... Italy is characteristic in that the hotel and restaurant businesses there are family-owned; hired workers are used minimally. The owner himself stands at the cash register, at the stove, his wife and daughter serve, and so on. We are not tailored to this model. Business there is not corporate; even mega-concerns belong to families. And the tax system in the country stimulates precisely the family business: tax payments for a hired employee with whom the owner is not related are twice as high as payments for a relative-employee. The state tells its citizens: provide for your family, the rest is my concern. In Germany, for example, the level of social security is very high, which is achieved through high tax deductions. This was the case for many years. And only now, when production rates have fallen and the number of pensioners has almost equaled the number of workers, the social system has begun to stifle and need reform. In Italy, nothing of the kind is happening.
Although Italy's economy is heterogeneous: the north and south differ as much as Switzerland and Romania. They say that our region - Lombardy with its capital in Milan - ranks first in Europe in terms of "net" wages - after tax payments. In Brescia this is very noticeable - in the number of good cars, in how people dress, in the restaurants.
We haven't been interested in schools yet - our child is studying at home, has gone to second grade. But acquaintances send their children to Italian schools. From their point of view, education there is not important, cannot be compared with good domestic schools. Parents think that their 14-year-old children, who at home already studied very serious things, are doing foolish things in Italian school. But whatever they say, the country keeps its shape, produces excellent products and goods - Ferrari is still made there. So Italians are hardly such an uneducated people. We would like our child to get an architectural education. That in Italy is exactly first-class. We haven't tackled this problem closely yet, and this conclusion is perhaps partly speculative. Although in any case it is not groundless: one cannot deny the richest history, construction, architectural, design traditions of this country, preserved literally in everything. Many world-class architects came from Milan Polytechnic University. Their futuristic school differs greatly from ours, which is academic to a large extent. Italians have natural design abilities - taste and imagination. Go into any tiny shop - and you will see with what impeccable taste everything is done there. Moreover, for sure the owner of this shop - a simple Italian - created this miracle with his own hands, without any outside professional help. It's no coincidence that the Italian brand dominates now everywhere - in clothing, furniture, and even in cars. The Mercedes concern already orders design from them too.
We are not planning to move to Italy permanently yet - things are going well here too. But we are not giving up building a backup airfield.
Brain Shake-up
For all that, immigration gave us a completely unique life experience - everyday and professional contacts, general development - and we became different people. It's such a powerful brain shake-up!
It's just said: Olga, they say, knew Italian, that's why everything worked out for her. But the fear was wild! And the language was half-dead, few words, mangled pronunciation. Seryoga left and left me to rent an apartment. I was rushing about, didn't know where to start, no car, couldn't even buy a bus ticket. Each step involved wild difficulty. Of course, one thing is a rich tourist who doesn't know a single language, he can spread his fingers like a fan and order a bicycle with all sorts of gadgets at a factory. But a completely different thing is when you are not a tourist and you need to go to offices, ask questions and understand the answers of officials, to whom you will have to turn more than once. On one hand, you want to get the necessary information, on the other - to make a good impression.
Maybe we were just lucky, but all the people we had to deal with did their work very energetically. They are always on the ball - both officials, and real estate agents, and waiters, and salespeople. In our country, a stereotype has developed that Italians cannot be trusted, that they are relaxed loafers, talkative and irresponsible, like Turks. We never happened to meet such people in the Italian north.
The only place where you can encounter unfriendly attitude and where it is really unpleasant to be is the questura. It's something like a police station where residence permits are renewed. There you have to stand for hours in the same line with all sorts of immigrants - black, yellow, slant-eyed, and the attitude towards everyone is equally disrespectful and suspicious. Only once, when I had to go to Paris for negotiations - and on trains, when crossing the border, documents are checked - officials agreed to speed up the processing of the residence permit, only asking to show the ticket.
True, with us even a ticket wouldn't have helped.
Price of Life
We are currently renting a rather expensive apartment - in the resort town of Salo on the shore of Lake Garda. It has two bedrooms, though the children's bedroom is tiny. We pay 700 euros per month for it. And food prices differ little from ours. Except that meat is a bit more expensive. But gasoline is significantly more expensive - one euro per liter. Therefore, buying a big car is unprofitable, although it is significantly cheaper, by 40-60 percent, than ours. Small cars with an engine capacity of 1.6 liters are slightly cheaper than on the domestic market - by 10-15 percent.
Prices are prices, but local products cannot be compared in quality with ours. They produce everything themselves - and they always have everything fresher: vegetables, fruits, meat, fish - we had simply never seen such fish! - and pasta, macaroni, and noodles as if homemade: soft, yellow, just rolled out. They don't know frozen products here at all. Cult products - such as, say, Parmesan cheese - are a national treasure that you can use as collateral at a bank. Stock quotes for this cheese are printed daily in the newspaper. You can get a loan against a batch of maturing cheese: at a certain price it is absolutely liquid, and the bank risks nothing. There are many dairy products whose existence we had never even heard of.
But our former compatriots, not accustomed to such food and having no taste for it, seem to be overcome with longing - they are drawn to German shops where sausages and other harmful fatty junk are sold. In Italy, the food is very healthy. There is always water on the table. The number of natural springs is countless. They eat lettuce leaves and follow the principle of separate meals - they would never eat meat with potatoes. They eat "according to Volkov" without any blood test. Therefore they are all sleek and well-groomed. At least the city dwellers of Lombardy. Elderly women walk in winter in shoes, stockings and fur coats, and ride bicycles. Italians are inveterate fashionistas, attach great importance to clothing, and in our little Brescia everyone dresses very elegantly, especially men, and expensively. I don't like women's fashion - it's too ornate. But men are a sight to behold. Against their background, Germans in their unchanging shorts and T-shirts look pitiful. There are many of them on the lake; in Munich they joke: Garda, they say, is the largest lake in Bavaria. The tourism industry of this place is oriented toward Germans.
Two passions
Italians like to sit in restaurants, talk about life, and stroll along the streets. But most of all they love football. There is a real cult of football - every housewife knows all the local footballers by face and by name, and remembers all the stories and gossip about them. We also once managed to go to a football match, and a bottle was hurled at us - fortunately, a plastic one. It was Brescia against Lazio - the locals against the Romans. Order was kept there by veritable cosmonauts - in helmets, armed with some kind of fantastic weapons. They stood at all the entrances and approaches to the stadium; the Roman fans were brought in literally under escort and placed in a special sector, fenced off from the rest of the public by iron netting as high as a nine-story building. A quarter of the stadium was allotted to ordinary spectators, half to Brescia fans, and another quarter to Roman fans. The Romans were brought by special buses directly to their sector, taken behind the fence, and a cordon was set up, a line of carabinieri with shields. Nevertheless, already in the middle of the first half, smoke bombs and some exploding devices making a wild noise flew from the fenced-in sector of Lazio fans at the police. The match went on, and the public watched as the police, formed into a wedge like Roman legionaries and covering themselves with shields, went behind the fence and very quickly quieted the raging crowd. But not for long. The stadium joyfully shouted: "They're beating the Romans!", and the Romans in response began throwing bottles. That's when we got it too.
They support their teams passionately and very noisily - they beat drums, jump up, and shout. It was like that even at that ordinary provincial match. One can imagine what goes on in Milan.
Another passion of Italians is opera. Everyone knows a great deal about it. The Arena in Verona is always completely full.
There is also a drama theater in Brescia; people go there by subscription. It seems Brescia has no theater troupe of its own, but touring companies come regularly. It's not only young people who go to discos. We also went when we were on holiday at a ski resort. I can testify: Italians know how to dance superbly and treat it as an art, not as mere pastime.
Well, in the movie theaters, the repertoire is practically the same as ours: the very same American films.
Fathers and Children
Italians treat children sternly, without coddling - the children study. During the school year you won't see them on the streets. Only in the morning when they take the bus to school, and in the afternoon when they come home. Seeing teenagers drinking beer in the park is out of the question. Even toddlers are constantly reprimanded: that's indecent, one doesn't behave like that, it's not nice to talk loudly... There seems to be a cult of children - the child is adored in the family, everything revolves around him. But they are kept strictly, the upbringing process never pauses. And one very strongly feels that the country has a low birth rate - there are few children.
The Catholic influence is also strongly felt; there are many Catholic schools - and you won't be able to act up there. A typical picture: festively dressed people go to church. They have a completely different mood from the one with which we go to Orthodox churches. We are raised in fear of God, but there is no humiliation of the individual; there, communication with God is a celebration. In addition to services, concerts of organ and violin music are held in the churches. Next to our house there is a Catholic church; there are always many people there, and they come with the whole family, invariably with children.
In Rome we saw a wedding. At Piazza di Spagna a long staircase leads to the entrance of a church, and the ceremony took place there. Although - it was completely secular. A crowd of people, all in hats and tailcoats. The bride and groom were taken away in a horse-drawn carriage. And in the church a string orchestra played.
Bookstores are always full of people; even in our little town there are bookshops that are open practically around the clock.
And everything else
In Italy, the attitude toward money is different. Italians place money only in fifth to seventh place in importance - after family, home, leisure, friends...
Our new apartment needed to be fully furnished. We go to a furniture store. There they make sketches, draw, develop interior design. We haven't bought anything yet, only looking around, and they are already working for us. The approach there is much softer, money is secondary, in business the idea is far more important. In our country, the initial accumulation of capital is still going on, and the Big Dollar obscures everything for many. Here the dollar determines our attitude to life; it dictates the perception of other people - necessarily through very expensive clothes, fancy cars, and the like. In Italy this is not the case. Of course, money is important - as a means of subsistence, they ensure quality of life. But if a company fulfilled its monthly plan in a week, it can quite allow itself to rest for the remaining three weeks. We have no limit: either freebies or working until you drop. I know this (Sergey) from my own company - people work to total exhaustion, to nervous breakdown, not sparing themselves.
And the attitude to work in Italy is completely different. Our financial consultant, a count in the tenth generation, does not consider it shameful to take a broom and sweep leaves from the steps of the company building. Can you imagine the owner of a domestic bank sweeping the yard? An Italian working as a waiter is not offended at the whole world for being not the prime minister. He does his job conscientiously - a pleasure to watch. If he is making coffee, then that is exactly what he is doing, and not chatting for half an hour, after which he casually remembers that he took an order.
The fact that in Italy business is family-owned also affects the quality of service. The owner often performs the functions of a waiter himself, while keeping everything under control. In Germany, for example, some enterprising person opened fifty bakeries, and he, in general, doesn't care whether the rolls baked there are tasty. There is no great personal interest. There is no warmth...
No one will teach this in any courses or schools - the style of running one's own business, the attitude to work. Elderly people no longer need this; everything is difficult for them - the language, getting used to foreign customs, and even foreign cuisine. But we are interested in everything - we stick our noses everywhere, ask about everything. I (Olga) have a textile education, I did my practical training at our textile factories, and if it weren't for the Italian residence permit, I would never have seen how all this is organized in Italy. Now I have such an opportunity, and I took advantage of it: they walked me through the factories, showed me everything, explained everything - from the first operation to the warehouse...
For us, this Italian experience is priceless; you cannot buy it for any money. We have advanced incredibly, and our child is advancing - he does not have that Soviet submissiveness, constraint, which we were stricken with; he grows up as a completely free person - it is already in his blood. However, there is no insolence or licentiousness either. Here you feel like a citizen of the world. This experience helps a lot at home too - you behave differently, perceive what is happening around you differently. And you think: it is good that this chance came our way.