Introduction

Greetings new reader!

I have created this blog in order to save precious time and misinformation to anyone thinking about relocating to Italy on a self-employed visa, or for someone already relocated and needs some information on steps that everyone must take regardless of their visa type.

Before diving in to my other posts, you need to understand the conditions under which I relocated and that any differences between you and me might result in some changes in procedures that I am writing about.

I am single, no children, self-employed computer programmer for many years, have a contract with a client in my country that I am continuing to work with almost on a full-time basis from Italy by remote.

I am from a country outside of the EU and I have no EU citizenship and have started my relocation process near the end of 2018.

I’ve chosen to relocate to Milan and all of my posts are based on my personal experience within Milan. Which is a different city then all others in Italy as far as I know. It’s modern, have good infrastructures, the public servants seem to know their job, and some of the procedures are available online.

Therefor, I can assume that this is a good city to start your relocation for the first year if you want things to go relatively smooth.

A few thumb rules you should remember:

• Nobody speaks English in Italy except the tourists. Nobody.
  Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying to you and himself/herself.
  You should have at least intermediate level in Italian before considering relocating or at least a translator that is willing to babysit you around through all of your appointments and errands.
• It’s going to take you about a year before you’ve finished all of the bureaucratic steps and you’ll be able to do anything that an Italian resident can do. During that time, you should expect to keep using services from your country.
• Consult with a tax adviser prior to starting your relocation process.
  The fact that your country has a reciprocal tax agreement with Italy doesn’t mean anything. Italy can claim that you are required to pay taxes because you live here more than 183 days a year. And your country can claim that your ‘center of life’ is there because you are still using their services (health, tax account, bank account, phone line, etc..)
• Consult an Italian accountant. The ordinary tax system in Italy means you will be paying a lot of taxes. There are certain regimes for self-employed meant to reduce that but you are eligible only if you earn up to a certain amount per year. Outside of those regimes it’s hell.
• If you’re renting a car, watch your speed limit. Italy has the highest speeding fines and they know how to collect them from you. And if you don’t pay within a certain amount of days they tend to triple.
• Italy is a poor country economically speaking and has a high unemployment rate.
  Don’t relocate with an expectation to improve your financial status (unless your own country is in the shit).
  You relocate to Italy to have fun and quality of life after making sure you can afford it mostly with external income.
• During July and August, Italians go on their vacation. And I mean all of them. It’s like a law here. Which means that most government offices work half-power and opening hours might be limited.
  That being said, I started my relocation during these months and had a smooth ride.
• Read through all of the posts before beginning. Some steps might require you to prepare things in advance.
  Also, your are on a clock. You must to certain steps within X amount of days and finish Y steps before your residency permit renewal time arrives. So you need to be on top of the timeline of all the steps before you start.
• Italian laws seems to change on a yearly basis.
  Make sure to use information only from recent articles when you do your research if they are not from official websites, or at least verify them with the official offices.
• Italians don’t like communicating via emails.
  If you write some city entity, you may have to write more than once to get a reply. And even if you translate into Italian and explain that they should answer via email because you don’t speak Italian, you’ll still get a phone call by someone that doesn’t speak a word of English.
  Or they might reply by ‘call us’ or ‘call this and that..’.
  They don’t seem to understand that ‘call us’ isn’t something that a new immigrant can do in Italy.
• When you need to get some document or card from some institute (i.e. Questura, Camera di commercio etc..) just because there are rules to what is required from you to get it, doesn’t mean that that’s what they will ask you for. Most of the time they don’t really remember and the make stuff up. Always go to the specific institute’s website, find the list of requirements for your situation, print it and show it to them if they start asking for unnecessary stuff. Don’t ask them what you need in order to get what you want. Tell them what you need. They need to see you are very much informed. It will make it harder for them to make stuff up they are not sure of.
• It takes the longest in Italy to obtain citizenship than with most Schengen countries. 5 years for permanent residency, 10 years to apply for citizenship and a passport, and then a few years of waiting for it to be approved.
• You are only allowed to drive with your international license for 1 years after obtaining residency. And a maximum of 60 days from residency data to drive a car with a foreign plate. If there is no license conversion agreement between Italy and your country you will have to start from scratch which includes doing the theoretical test in Italian or German. There is no English option.
  

If you did go through this process, or a different process for a different type of visa and you have some information you would like to share, please do so using the contact form. I will review it and add it to the blog as needed.

I will be adding more posts from time to time since this blog is new.
You may subscribe (at the bottom of each post) to receive email updates when I post something new.

One more thing – I am not an attorney and I’m not giving any legal advice here. Everything is based solely on my experience.

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