(spoiler: I wanted to!)
I know the immigration theme is hot right now, but my tale is a happy one, I am a privileged immigrant.
My friends and family know – because I’ve tormented them for years talking about it – that my dream has always been to request my Italian citizenship and live in Italy. Of my 8 great-grandparents, 6 were Italian and immigrated to Brazil, and even before I had ever set foot in Italy, I had a passion for the country that I’ve never been able to explain. I wanted to redo my grandparent’s journey, backwards.
For years I considered the best way to achieve it: via the consulate in Brazil would take too long (more than ten years), through a legal claim with a lawyer is a little faster, but it is expensive, so I finally decided that I would do everything at once: move to Italy while processing locally the citizen request. So, I studied Italian and about all the bureaucracy needed, to do everything by myself. As a digital nomad, it was a considerably “easy” move.
To cut it short, I made it. I moved, requested citizenship, and 6 months later I was an Italian citizen, and when I had all my documents ready… Italy entered in Lockdown. Yep. When I got my Italian ID, the very next day, COVID was spreading and Italy entered in lockdown, so I could not properly start my Italian life and spent the next 2 months locked in a small flat that should have been temporary, but due to my citizenship process taking more time than expected and then lockdown, the temporary arrangements were my home for 1 year.
As the information above shows, this happened in 2020, but I’ve never told how my Italian life came to be in a structured way, and now I feel like writing about it, writing about how I became an immigrant. I am not sure if someone is interested, but it interests me, as my personal register, so I am registering it. Feel free to ride along with me.