Casa Dolce Casa

 “Our house is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard…”

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Our House

There is no wireless internet here as of yet; it’s not included with the rent so I will need to sort this out in the near future.  Apologies in advance that there will be no photos with this post

A very busy day!  After sleeping off the stresses of yesterday in our very nice room (more of a suite, actually) at the B&B, we had an early breakfast prepared by the proprietor, Giovanni.  Breakfast was cappuccino and what we would call marble cake, I think.  Italian breakfasts tend to be sweet in general; we will have to get used to this (this will not be a problem for me, anyway).  Then we said goodbye to our host, packed up the car and braved the streets of Campobasso once again to head into what appeared to be the business district for my 9:30 AM appointment at the Agenzia delle Entrate - the revenue agency - in order to obtain my codice fiscale, my Italian tax ID number.  It’s a 16-digit code, both letters and numbers, and it is generated based on letters in your name, your birthday, and place of birth - so there is no need to keep it secret as you would a US social security number because most can be easily calculated.   Like a social security number, it is used for tax purposes, but also for so much more - shopping online, securing a lease, acquiring a SIM card and phone number, obtaining utilities, and lots of other things.  I needed to have it for signing our (well, technically my) lease, and I will need it when I submit my paperwork for citizenship recognition, too.

We arrived on time for the appointment - dear husband parked behind the Agenzia office and stayed with the car in case he needed to move it - again, not much parking available so he may or may not have been parked legally.  Not that it seems to matter here; we saw cars parked at weird angles with their front ends entirely on the sidewalks.  

I met with Anna, my interpreter for the morning, who scheduled the appointment for me.  We walked into building where, seated in the foyer, was a member of the Polizia di Stato (state police), who greeted us and confirmed my appointment.  He generated a ticket for me at a machine very like the kind you see at the DMV, and pointed us to a large room with a waiting area and a row of numbered, plexiglass-fronted cubicles, each with a clerk behind a desk.  There was an electronic message board on one wall indicating which tickets were being called to each numbered cubicle; when my ticket number was displayed, we went to the clerk at cubicle #1, an older gentleman whose job it was to review the relatively simple form and generate the codice fiscale.

Now, one thing about Italy is that women never change their names upon marriage - it’s just not done here, at all, ever.  In fact, Italians can change their surnames only under very limited circumstances as per the law, as I understand it.  So the clerk looked at my form which lists my surname as my maiden name, and checked my passport, which shows my surname as my married name, and he was questioning the difference.  Fortunately, we anticipated this, and also brought along copies of my birth certificate and my marriage certificate, and Anna explained to the clerk how common it is in the US for married women to change their names.  I got the sense that he thought the name change thing was a stupid idea, but at least he seemed to accept her explanation for the discrepancy.  Next he questioned why we left my street address off of the application form (it listed only the name of the town).  Anna explained to him for me that it wasn’t on the form because I had yet to sign the lease; in fact, I would be doing so later today.  He seemed to have less of a problem with this than he did with my name.  Once we got all this out of the way, he generated the codice fiscale on paper for me (later I will receive a card).  So that is the very first step of this process accomplished!

After the appointment, my other interpreter Nicoletta was waiting for me outside.  She and a guy that may or may not have been her boyfriend led the way in their car as we drove from Campobasso up and over - and sometimes through - the hills (smallish mountains?) to our new town; it took just under an hour to get here.  We parked on the main drag as directed; sitting on a bench nearby was one of our two new landlords - the husband half of a super nice married couple.  He is an older gentleman; his younger (or at least younger-looking) wife is the town’s doctor, whose office is downstairs from our apartment.  She soon joined us and we went inside to see the apartment.  They explained (through Nicoletta, as they do not speak English) that they live down the street; next week she is moving her office to another building so after that we will be the only ones in the property.   

On floor 0 (street level), inside the front door there is the door to the doctor’s office to the left, and the door to the right is for our apartment.  Up two relatively short flights of stairs and you arrive at the first floor - to the left is the living room with what I think you'd call a Juliet balcony, and to the right is the eat-in kitchen.  There is a gas stove with an oven, and a mid-side refrigerator with a small freezer (the fridge and freezer are two separate units, hidden behind cabinetry; they are smaller than American-sized but larger than some Italian ones we’ve seen).  There is neither a dishwasher nor a microwave.  Up another two short flights of stairs takes you to the master bedroom (with another small balcony) and two full bathrooms.  One is powder-room sized with just a sink, a toilet, and a narrow shower stall; the other other bathroom is quite a bit larger with both a toilet and bidet, a somewhat larger shower stall, as well as a small washing machine (clothes dryers are not common in Italy, so we expected - correctly - we would not have one here).  The next level up has a guest bedroom (without a bed as of yet, but Nicoletta said that the landlords could provide one if we were to have any guests), and a sort of utility room area with an enclosed terrace balcony - the windows here open and it was suggested we can dry our clothes on a drying rack here, or get ourselves a little table and chairs.  The rooms all have separate radiators; the heat is on, although it doesn’t seem particularly cold here yet to me.  I’m not sure whether we can adjust this.

I and the landlords signed the lease; as I understand it, it will probably be registered at the town hall tomorrow.  Once it is registered, I will have my next appointments scheduled at the town hall here to begin the citizenship recognition process.  The first appointment will probably not be any earlier than next Tuesday, as Monday is All Saints' Day, a holiday here; everything will be closed.

The doctor then excused herself to get back to her clinic appointments.  We took a walk around the town with Nicoletta, her maybe-boyfriend, and the husband landlord.  They pointed out various buildings, shops, and the three bars on our street.  One of the bars is also a pizza place, but they only serve pizza at night, after 7:00 PM.  I think we saw a gelateria (gelato shop) as well, though we didn't notice any other restaurants in this section of town.  We passed by the town hall, and a couple of churches, as well as the tower, which the landlord offered to take us to one of these days.  The town is very quiet and seems rather empty right now - we were told that people are away working the olive harvest.  Also, we observed that there are quite a number of properties for sale - many of which appear to require extensive renovations. 

After our tour, we doubled back and stopped in one of the little grocery stores to pick up a few things (pasta, sauce, toilet paper, cornetti (kind of like croissants) and a small jar of a Nutella-like spread (a fancier brand, I was told) to put on our cornetti for breakfast tomorrow.  Oh, and coffee - not American-style filtered coffee, but Italian-style coffee that is made on the stove in a moka pot and poured into wee little cups - espresso.

Once we retuned to our apartment with our groceries, Nicoletta and company left us to ourselves.  We had a bit of a rest before setting out to explore on our own.  We were getting rather hungry - Nicoletta said lunch time doesn’t really begin until about 1 PM; most of the shops are closed between 1 PM and 4 or 5 PM but reopen for a couple or three hours before closing again for the night.  We stopped at the largest of the bars, which has outdoor seating, and sipped a couple of glasses of white wine, while munching on olives and a crusty bread topped with olive oil.  The olives, which were not pitted, seemed a bit firmer than the olives we're used to, and they tasted very good.  I wonder if they are processed differently?  While we were there, a man came over to us who appeared excited to meet us and seemed desperately to want to chat with us - but he didn’t speak any English and we only understood a very little of his Italian (we learned later in the evening that there is a local dialect here that is not like formal Italian).  We tried using the iTranslate app on my phone, but my cell/data connection wasn’t the greatest, so that didn’t work very well.  Soon his friend showed up, and he was British!  He (the friend) said that he’s lived here for about eight years.  He was able to act as our interpreter.  There was a third friend as well, but he didn’t really say much.  My husband took a picture of me with our new friends the Englishman and the first man on the scene, showing us trying to communicate. The first man wanted to know our names, where we were living, when we had arrived, and also wanted to know what our relationship to one another was.  I’m not sure he believed we are married to each other.  He asked us how many children we have, and so on.  It was really all very friendly and the guy did seem genuinely interested.  The Englishman mentioned that there are a small number of other people who speak English in the town.  I wish I could remember their names - but as this town is so small I have no doubt we will run into them all again very soon.

While we were out exploring on our own, we ran into the husband landlord on the street; he stopped us for another chat - but of course we had difficulty communicating without Nicoletta there.  Hubs thinks he was trying to sell us a house (he owns a couple of others besides this one, we gather), and he also talked about one of the buildings across the street from where we were standing - I pointed out a cat on the sidewalk out front (there are a lot of cats roaming about here) and I think he was saying something about the owner of that house having 20 cats!  I don’t know whether landlord-husband has a job of his own; from what we observed today at least, he seems to just walk around town all day, popping back over here now and then to chat with his wife’s patients outside her clinic.

We came back to the apartment, did some unpacking, and decompressed.  I stood out on the upstairs balcony and the landlord was down below again - this time I could make out that he was asking me about our car (macchina), and saying something about the mercato (market). I was finally able to piece together that he was advising us that there will be a market in town on Saturday (sabato), and that we would need to move our car, and there was a truck somehow related to the upcoming market day already parked near our car.  Hubby and I went downstairs to chat with him some more, but we couldn’t really figure out whether he wanted us to move the car now, or  just at some time before market day.  To be on the safe side, we moved it.  I think the gentleman possibly may have been trying to tell us where to move it, but I don’t know for sure and anyway we found a spot just around the corner, so no big deal.

Dear Husband cooked up the pasta for dinner; after eating, we took another walk around town and stopped again at our new favorite watering hole - this time each of had a very nice glass of Montepulciano.  And we met…another English speaker.  He was born here, but his family moved to England when he was a small child so he grew up there.  He wondered what on Earth brought us to this little town.  He was very nice.  Everyone we spoke to today was very nice to us actually, even if they didn’t understand us.

Tomorrow’s goals are to find an ATM, and possibly take a drive to Termoli if the weather continues to be as pleasant as it has been the last two days (it’s been warmer and drier than we expected - Indian Summer kind of weather, almost).  We need to make a shopping list as well, as there are some household items we will need that I don’t think we can get here.  We could order from Amazon.it, if worst comes to worst - but I’d rather buy from the local shops for the experience of meeting people, etc.