Italian bureaucracy - parte uno

Ever sell a car in North Carolina? Pretty straightforward – in the presence of a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) official or a notary public, sign your name as the seller in the space provided on the title, get the buyer to do the same in his/her space on the title, and you’re done.

But woe betide if the title is jointly held by more than one person, and one of the title-holders is not physically present. It’s worse if one of said joint title-holders is in Italy. I know. From first-hand experience. Here’s what happens.

In spite of the bad name that US DMV’s have, they actually make it quite easy for an absent title-holder to let someone else sign for them. It’s a simple half-page Power of Attorney (PoA) form, most of it white space, with a few spaces for things like make, model, year, title-holder name, and signature – not much more than that. So if the title-holder was in, say, California, they’d merely have to fill out the form, sign it in the presence of a notary public, and fax it – yes, fax it – to the other title-holder for the closing.

In concept, one would think that this principle would be easily transferable to another language. Russian – perhaps. Swedish – maybe. Italian – no. But it has nothing to do with the language, and everything to do with the national bureaucracy.

The mistake we made – with Maria in Italy and me in North Carolina – was to say the PoA was for the sale of a car. We would have been better off saying it was a general PoA. But hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty, or, in this case, vente-vente.

First of all, finding a notary public in Italy to sign such a document in August is well nigh impossible, with the country’s “out for lunch” sign permanently displayed in the window for the entire month. Next, notary publics, or notaio’s, in Italy seem to have a different standing in the community, and they have gold-plated signs outside their offices. Gold-plated signs outside offices still mean something in Italy – I’m not sure exactly what, but it’s clearly something to aspire to (for reasons that I won’t go into here). I don’t know what training they have to go through, but they seem to hold a station akin to that of, say, a magistrate, and as a result, there are simply not that many of them. The notaio in Tolentino – yes, just the one in a town of 40,000-plus – was on vacation, so Maria had to go to another town to find someone to sign the document.

That’s of course after she had spent numerous hours with an Italian attorney “translating” the document. As the first order of translating business, the attorney asked her: “That’s all you need to transfer a car’s title in the US?” Needless to say, there were evil forebodings in those words, and the “translation”, which required me to fax her the titles of the cars, somehow turned a half-page, mostly-white-space form into a 3-page document of dense type and intense legalese. Having spent two full days getting this done, and finally finding a notaio that wasn’t on vacation some 50 km distant, they faxed over the completed document.

Mission accomplished? Far from it. First – the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) of one of the two cars on the PoA was wrong, the title number having been entered instead (duh – of course it’s a different number, everyone knows that). Given the amount of effort that went into all of this, I deemed this inexcusable, and yet at the same time, entirely understandable. The NC DMV considered such an error irretrievable – they wouldn’t accept it that way. It needed to be done again.

However, that wasn’t the only problem – the translation, quite obviously, was in Italian! Not a language that the NC DMV is accustomed to dealing in. So, having received the fax in Chapel Hill, I had to not only find an official Italian translator – a commodity as abundant as notaio’s in Italy in August, I might add – but one that could do it in a day. After a mad scramble, I found one – at a fairly hefty price, of course – only to discover the VIN/title number error after the work had already been commissioned.

It goes on from there, in similar vane. Suffice it to say that so far we’ve transferred one title successfully (when I was still in the US), and we’re now awaiting the transfer of the second. This latter one will have to be done by a third party acting as PoA on both of our parts, given that we’re here in Italy. Naturally, we’re expecting it to go without a hitch…