The café Emilio asked me to meet him at was extremely generic, uninteresting, and practically empty. He had been so abrupt on the phone that I still had no idea if I was waiting for him inside, on the street or in his jeep. Needless to say, there aren’t many white SUV’s in Milan, so I figured I’d be able to spot him pretty easily. I waited, and waited. He was definitely over half an hour late.

I heaved a sigh and decided I better go home and start considering potential Italian spouses since Plan B – marriage as a solution to the visa issue – now seemed like the only viable option. I had one Italian friend who was an artist and longed to move to California to produce music. He knew I wanted a visa, and he wanted US citizenship, so offered me twenty grand plus a Milan apartment and guaranteed divorce in five years. I turned him down. Guess I’m a romantic.

As absurd and desperate thoughts passed through my head, a short, balding man with a strawberry blonde mustache and briefcase entered the café. He held his finger up to me, quickly ordered an espresso and asked if there was anything I wanted.

“You’re Emilio?” I mean, that’s what I wanted to know.

“She’ll have a café macchiato,” he told the barista.

We sat at a small table where Emilio downed his espresso in one sip and proceeded to make phone calls. I sat silently stirring my foam. After several gruff exchanges Emilio finally hung up his cell and turned his attention to me. I told him my dilemma and asked if he could help. He stood up.

“I’ll show you what I can do. It’s all in my office.”

We left the café and I saw the infamous white Jeep parked on a nearby side street. In reality, it was more grey then white. The black cover over the spare tire was ragged and torn and the vehicle itself looked like it had just been through ten days of trekking in the Sahara. We got in the parked car and Emilio reached into the backseat which contained amassed stacks of file folders and documents. He showed me the promesso di soggiorno for a blonde Bulgarian girl he had recently done the paperwork for. He fanned out to me all of her necessary documents with a smirk. They were all legit. Emilio pleasantly performed a bunch of calculations in his head mumbling to himself and counting on his fingers.

“I can get you the visa in two weeks, that’s the soonest. And you have to go back to America and re enter the country. You’ll also have to get a new passport ‘cause if the Italian consulate in the US sees you’ve already been living here he’ll tie you up in problems for three months.” Emilio chuckled to himself, then continued.

“It’s a permesso di soggiorno per lavoro autonomo. You come in as a model with this -” he held up the logo of an agency I’ll call Faces, it was a reputable place that also had a TV and voiceover division. I knew the owner Silvio and while his agency seemed okay, he himself was sketchy as fuck.

“But I’ve never worked with Faces” I pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter,” Emilio said. “It’s a formality. They sponsor you to come in as a model. We say this is your address, that you live in this models apartment. It’s not illegal once you’re in the country for you to get your own place or change agencies. Faces is just how you’ll get in. When you do the Carta Identita you put your own address you have now without a problem.”

The Carta Identita? This Italian Identity card, a small booklet which you could travel on throughout Europe, was kind of the bureaucratic equivalent of an American driver’s license. Now I was hooked.

“I can get the Carta Identita?” I asked in disbelief. Emilio nodded. “This type of visa is freelance – you can do any kind of work you want. As long as you report in your taxes, you can renew next year, then every two years, then you’re done. You get a permanent EU residence card.”

“How much is this all going to cost me?” I asked, since it was sounding way too good to be true.

“Seven hundred Euro cash. When you need to renew, call me, we’ll sort something out.”
Was that a joke? Sign me up.

As Emilio relaxed he began to name drop a few of the people he’d done visas for. Every foreigner on RAI plus several other Americans who worked in Italian TV (some who I even knew) had been Emilio clients years ago. He did the paperwork for all the Eastern European models in city and made regular trips to the Italian consulate in Russia and Romania. In short, Emilio was a legendary underground figure - the Santa Claus of visas if you will. And he had no qualifications whatsoever except for the fact that he himself used to work in the Italian Questura, had some hook-ups, and then mastered this quick efficient system using both overseas connections within consulates and different Italian bureaucratic “friends” to get visa expedited and approved as quickly as possible.

From there, everything happened very fast. I flew back to the states “lost” my passport upon entering the country, scrambled to get a new one in forty eight hours and was FedExed a series of documents from Emilio to take to the Italian consulate. At the consulate in the States I was briefly interviewed by several haggard Italian officials who then stamped all the papers I gave them and sent me to the office next door, where an identical official and his stamp would repeat this entire process. I flew back to Italy with a shiny visa on page one of my blank passport. Perhaps the most amusing moment of this entire experience is when I went with Emilio to the Italian Questura for my necessary “check in” / “visa approval” and fingerprinting. Foreigners line up outside the Questura starting at five am to be the first in line for tickets when the place opens because they the Questura only sees something like only a total of fifty foreigners every other Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from nine to noon. Emilio and I walked past this line of literally hundreds of people, gave a quick wave to the guard and entered the Questura’s main floor which is basically a horrific administrative maze of lines, tickets, beeping numbers being called, and dozens of little teller windows.

Emilio made his way through the hundreds of individuals literally camping out by the teller windows to a secret door on the far right hand corner of the room. He and I quickly entered and were now BEHIND all the teller windows. Emilio slipped me to one of his friends and I gave my fingerprints while he joyously greeted his buddies in the Questura back office. Emilio then escorted me to one of his teller friends (yes, we’re still BEHIND administrative lines) who quickly stamped my documents (yeah, the Italians love stamps) and I was done. Emilio and I stayed behind the teller windows with the administrative staff and enjoyed some of their coffee and cornettos before heading out.

Emilio evolved to become quite jovial and sweet once you get to know him (although he never manages to be on time to this day). We said our goodbyes and he told me to save all my tax receipts and to check in with him next year when we’d do my renewal. I’d done it. I was a legal EU girl.

For those of you wondering about the TV job, well, even with Emilio’s expedited magic I didn’t manage to get everything in order before the show’s shooting date. The good news is that since I was legal, I did eventually penetrate the TV world and ended up on a program very soon after on la 7 instead of Sky. At the end of that summer, my agent excitedly called me saying the Sky show was going to do a second season and wanted me on it, no audition or anything required. At that point however, I was already planning to move back to New York to study writing and actually do something productive with my life. By the time the show started filming, I’d already be on the other side of the pond.

Ah. Such is life.