Dr. Alicia Wong keeps a colour-coded spreadsheet tracking every day she’s spent in Italy.
The parts in green are marked ‘Valid card’. Occasional splashes of yellow and orange are for ‘Appointment’ and ‘Application/renewal’.
Dominating the page, in angry blocks of fire-engine red, are the days simply labelled ‘Limbo’.
"The original idea was to turn it into some sort of art work," she says. “I soon realised I would need a lot of red paint.”
A postdoctoral researcher in microbiology at the University of Perugia, Wong has lived in Italy for just over four years, of which more than two and a half (946 days, according to the spreadsheet) have been without a valid residency permit.
In theory, obtaining Italy's residency permit, or permesso di soggiono, ought to be a straightforward bureaucratic process for those who are already in Italy on a valid visa.
In reality, applicants frequently report delays of over a year, with some saying they've repeatedly not received their document until after it’s already expired.
Now on her third permit, the longest Wong has had to wait at a time is 15 months.
By the time she receives the card, it's usually valid for around six months, meaning it's almost time to start the renewal process again.
She estimates that she spends at least five days a year preparing and filing the paperwork and attending appointments for the permesso, on top of a job that often requires her to work late into the evening.
"It's insane," she says. “There's no information about what's going on. There's no estimation of how long things will take.”
For foreign residents from outside the EU, a valid residency permit is essential for all aspects of life in Italy.
Being without one for months at a time has caused Wong problems renewing her Italian health card or registering a change of address.
READ ALSO: ‘Horrific’: What it’s like applying for Italy’s residency permit
There’s supposed to be an official workaround: when permit applicants go for their appointment at the questura (provincial police headquarters), they're issued with a ricevuta (receipt) that can be used in its place until they receive the real thing.
But Wong has had officials tell her her ricevuta was issued so long ago it’s no longer valid, and been sent back to the questura to get it recertified.
At a 2024 appointment, the receipt was stamped with an expiry date nine months in the future under a new policy; she wasn’t given any instructions about what to do once the time was up.
At any point in the process, getting in touch with the questura officials overseeing your case for an update on its progress is widely regarded as near-impossible – let alone securing an in-person appointment.
Though some of The Local’s readers say they’ve had success hiring lawyers to help with the process, an immigration lawyer friend of a friend who offered to look into Wong’s case for free told her they couldn’t help as their own system for booking appointments with the Perugia questura had been blocked.
“I feel it's getting worse,” Wong says.
“I'm not sure why, and I'm almost afraid to ask why.”
READ ALSO: Four articles to read before applying for an Italian residency permit
It’s not just the day-to-day aspects of life in Italy that are affected by the lack of a permit, but residents’ ability to see family or friends abroad or travel for work.
The ricevuta can be used for travel to non-Schengen countries but isn’t valid for use within the EU’s Schengen Area, meaning foreign residents are barred from travelling to most of the rest of Europe until their permit comes through.
“My boss wanted to send me to Spain for a training course with this biotech company,” says Wong, “and I was like, I don’t have my permit.”
Though she could have applied for a one-off travel document, Wong felt it wasn’t worth putting in the effort for an outcome that wasn’t guaranteed.
“I don't want to be booking all my flights and then waiting up to the last day only to find out I'm rejected,” she says.
“I just want to avoid that kind of stress because the job itself is already stressful.”
While she could theoretically travel to a country outside the EU on a ricevuta, “I never dare to,” Wong says, as she once had her documents checked when travelling from Singapore to Italy.
“If for whatever reason they decide to be extremely harsh and want to track everything I want to have everything in order,” she explains.
That means she rarely gets to see her family back home in Singapore or her partner in the US.
“I try to divide my trips between those two countries in my limited vacation time,” Wong says.
When her current permit came through in December, she says, her immediate reaction was “‘Oh my God, I can breathe again’ – I could finally take a vacation home.”
The irony of holding a Singaporean passport – regularly ranked as the most powerful in the world – isn’t lost on Wong.
“If I came as a tourist, I could go anywhere, there's no problem,” she says.
“I gave up the privilege of having the strongest passport in the world, not needing to apply for a visa anywhere, just to be stuck here waiting for my permit card for months on end.”
Most foreigners in Italy can apply for permanent residency after five years. But Wong has been told that as a researcher in Italy on a series of fixed-term contracts, she’s not eligible for a long-term permit: “so this is a thing I’m going to be facing for the foreseeable future”.
All this uncertainty has taken its toll. “Last year, I was at my edge,” she says. “I was almost going to go to my boss and say I can't do this anymore.”
If she had known about the obstacles she'd encounter beforehand, Wong says, she might have thought twice about moving to Italy in the first place.
She says support from colleagues and friends has been key to making all the bureaucracy bearable, but adds that she’d probably not have stayed if she had a family to think about.
“I'm trying to hold out: in some ways I can do this because I am not married, I don't have dependents, I don't have children,” she says. “If I had children I would probably reconsider.”
For now, she says, “I'm focusing on building my career here.”
“I've got great support career-wise from my current boss, which is very hard to come by, so I'm not taking that for granted – but then I know I still have to deal with all the bureaucratic issues.”
Ultimately, she says, “even with the instability of the job, even with all the document issues, I'm still here. I'm choosing to be here, and I hope she understands that.”
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