ciao, bella

Woah.

Epic news.

I am officially a citizen of Italy!!!

My mother is Italian and about 5 years ago she got the brilliant idea of applying for dual citizenship in Italy. It's a very long and complicated process, which is probably why dual citizenship isn't as common as one would think in such a culturally diverse country where pretty much everyone's grandparents are from somewhere else. It took my mom about two years just gathering all the necessary documents, which included birth, marriage, and death certificates of a crazy amount of her family line. Then she had to get all those documents translated into English.

Finally, when she had everything prepared, we went to the Italian consulate in San Francisco where we were told, much to our dismay, that they didn't even have a person on staff at the moment to review dual citizenship applications.

Three years have since passed and occasionally one of us would mention how we "really need to see how that dual citizenship thing is working out", but of course no one ever volunteered to spend their day at the consulate office so it never happened.

Then, out of the blue, this arrived in the mail two days ago:


Isn't my mom's maiden name so pretty? This is my official document:




I have no idea what it says. Thank gawd there's no language requirement. My middle name is Elizabeth, as you can tell from the letter. My first name is "Strawberry" and my last name is "The Bomb", which you all know, so I didn't think it was necessary to reveal them here.