My Life in Italy, Part 15: Race Against the Clock

Every time I think about a wedding, Wallace Shawn shows up in my head lisping about “mawwiage” and “twue wuv.” Sorry, can’t help it! It ruined weddings for me forever… in the best possible way.

As with every post in this series, if you’re jumping in here, it’s like walking into a movie halfway through. Go start with Part 1, or none of this is going to land.

In my last post, I left you right at the proposal, and I warned you we were about to deal with something like 126,000 pieces of documentation just to get married. OK, not literally 126,000. But seriously felt like it! Now before I get into that, I need to drop some context on you.

We’re in Italy. And in 1980’s Italy, you had two options for getting married:

1. In church
2. In city hall

Sounds simple, right? No. Not even close!

In small-town Central Italy at the time, those options got a lot more complicated. Get married in city hall, and that was basically a public declaration that you were a communist. Sit with that for a second. It was the 1980s. Soviet Union, Cold War, bomb shelters, the constant reality of nuclear dread in the background of everything. And remember… I’m American.

But it goes deeper: Paola’s dad had been chairman of the local Democratic party. Not Democratic as in Democrat versus Republican. Democratic as in Democracy versus “seize the means of production.”

So if his daughter got married in city hall, he’d be looking at a full-blown political and reputational firestorm. A church wedding it was, then. And I was completely fine with that.

But that was the only complication, right?

Wrong.

But before I continue, as usual I need to get you in the frame of mind of the time. It is 1986, I’m getting married, and…

OK, I got that off my chest! I’m preparing to get married while my radio blasts this song at me every day! Not lyrics I needed in my head at this time of my life, but the song was awesome!

The Pizza Bagel

L.A. dude here. I came from a mixed-faith family. Dad was Jewish, Mom was Catholic. How did they raise me?

Jew-lic, obviously. Pizza Bagel.

They’d come to an understanding early on: I’d get full exposure to both, and I’d figure it out on my own when I grew up.

So weddings and funerals happened in the church or the synagogue, depending on which side of the family. Easter with Mom’s side, Passover with Dad’s. I got an amazing Christmas every year, and there was a menorah in the house. That often meant Catholic school during the day. Somebody’s Bar Mitzvah that same night.

Net result: no official religious affiliation. And if I was getting married in a Catholic church in Italy… well, you kind of need to be Catholic for that part to work.

I was fine with it. So, what did I need to do to make it official? Relax. We’re in Italy. Padre Michele will take care of everything!

What the $@%#& is an Apostille?

I promised you the 126,000 documents. Some from Italy. A lot more from the US. Wedding’s set for May 1986, so timing had to be perfect… to the day. Late 1985, we flew back to LA. And the clock started ticking.

Here’s what I needed, for the Italian government:

• My U.S. passport
• A certified long-form birth certificate
• A sworn declaration with unrelated witnesses before a U.S. consular officer at the Italian Consulate in Los Angeles, stating that, under U.S. law, there was no legal impediment to the marriage.
• A letter from the LAPD confirming that I was in good standing.
• A letter from the FBI confirming the same.
• Certified Italian translations of every American document above.

Getting all of this was step 1. But it all also needed to be authenticated with a Hague Apostille.

A what????

So: get it, notarize it, get a signed affidavit swearing it’s all true, then take the whole stack down to the Secretary of State’s office in LA and request the Apostille.

Done? Of course not!

The Apostille on the sworn declaration and the birth certificate had an expiration date. 180 days. Get them too early, they’d lapse before we needed to submit them in Italy. And try getting a “certificate of good standing” out of the FBI on demand. Or the LAPD, who do not, in fact, just hand that over because you walk in and ask nicely.

Then get it all translated and certified by the Italian consulate, which makes the DMV look like a Chick-fil-A drive-through.

Everything had to be timed to the day, or the whole stack would go stale before the wedding did.

January 28, 1986, 8:39 a.m. Pacific Time

We built our whole timeline around one appointment: the consulate visit to certify everything before applying for the Apostille. The wedding was set for May 24, 1986. An appointment in late January gave us a clean two-month buffer.

Why do I know the exact date?

Because that morning we drove to pick up Anna. Not Zia Anna, the one you met terrorizing my motorcycle in Part 14… a completely different, much friendlier Anna, a close friend who’d agreed to be our “unrelated witness” for the consulate paperwork.

I can tell you exactly what time we got there, because when she opened the door, the TV was blasting inside and there was a lot of commotion behind her.

That’s the moment the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded.

None of that has anything to do with this story. It happened, that’s all. I just like planting a frame of reference where I can find one. If you remember that day, you remember exactly where you were. I was picking up Anna to go certify a mountain of documents at the Italian Consulate in Los Angeles.

Back to Italy…

Once we had everything from the US, it was back to Italy. Because of course there were more documents. Now we had to hand off what we’d collected and deal with the Church side, because the Church had zero interest in losing a bureaucracy contest to the Italian government. Here’s what they wanted:

• A recent baptismal certificate issued “for marriage”
• A confirmation certificate.
• Proof of canonical freedom to marry
• The declarations from the consulate
• A diocesan dispensation from disparity of cult.

Okay, the consulate stuff, fine, I had that. Everything else? I don’t have a baptismal certificate. I was never baptized. Confirmation? Can’t confirm what was never baptized. Canonical freedom to marry?

And cult??? The Church wanted written proof I hadn’t been drinking any Kool-Aid, literally or otherwise. If that reference means nothing to you, go Google “drinking the Kool-Aid” and head back over here.

And all of that assumed I was already Catholic. Nope! And if you know anyone who’s converted, you know the drill: RCIA, a long stretch of classes, months of process.

But in 1980s small town Italy, the concept of “not Catholic” was an incredibly foreign concept. So “How to Become Catholic” wasn’t really a thing. Maybe I can put this in better context. “Not Italian” was also a strange concept to most. I’ll take it a step further… My last name has letters that did not exist in Italian! K? What is K? So when they would read “Kovnick”, some would get frustrated just trying to spell it. And Michael? Well, if you read this whole series… Michael Jackson!

But there was good news on that front. Italy runs on complex bureaucracy, for sure. But it also runs on knowing the right people. And we did.

Enter Padre Michele

We knew Padre Michele. I introduced him briefly in Part 12: “Bury The Mice In The Ground… Slowly.”, but let’s actually get to know him, because this part mattered to me. A lot.

He was a missionary priest who lived up in the mountains. No parish. And he was the other person in town that spoke English. And he was about to walk me through becoming Catholic.

Before you picture anything, get it out of your head. Whatever image just formed, he wasn’t that. In an earlier life he’d been a journalist at a national newspaper. Before that, a flight attendant for Alitalia. He came from money, had all of it, and at forty he had some kind of epiphany and rebuilt his entire life around the priesthood. He was one of the best people I have ever known. A dear friend.

So my path to Catholicism looked nothing like what you’d expect. A few times a week I’d drive up to his house. No appointment. No plan. Just “I think I’ll go see Michele today.” I’d show up, there’d always be other people there, we’d sit, he’d pour some wine, light a cigarette, and we’d talk. No curriculum, no lesson plan. Just conversation. Sometimes about nothing. Sometimes it drifted into faith without either of us steering it there. A friend visiting a friend.

Until one day he baptized me. Another day we drove to the Bishop’s house and he got me confirmed. “Oh, let’s stop by his place” and, boom, confirmed. First communion followed. One, two, three. Everything the Church needed from me got handled the same way everything in Italy gets handled: through friendship.

Don’t mistake any of that for taking it lightly. I didn’t. Padre Michele ended up being one of the biggest influences of my life, and he helped me set down a lot of baggage I was still carrying about the Church. Remember, I went to Catholic school. And no, it’s not what you’re picturing. Our principal was Father Bitterman, and the man could not have been better named, because he was a very bitter man. And don’t get me started on Brother Hill, and the day I told him that if he thought he was representing God, he was doing a hell of a job making the rest of us want nothing to do with Him.

But Padre Michele? Completely different animal. The days I would go up there are priceless memories. I can just close my eyes right now and picture myself on his patio on a chilly afternoon, sitting on an outdoor sofa with a glass of wine, looking out at the Tiber Valley… smoke coming out of chimneys in the valley below, the aroma of a fireplace inside… and just chatting all afternoon.

All of this played out over roughly six months leading up to the weddings. And yes, I said “weddings,” plural. I’ll leave that thread hanging right there for the next post. For now, we’re up to March 1, 1986.

The Takeaway

Writing this one, I kept remembering how insanely frustrated I was back then with all the bureaucracy. I remember thinking we could just drive to Vegas and be married in ten minutes flat, damn the paperwork! And the wedding wasn’t even the half of it. That was just one tiny sample of what runs through Italian society at every level, for nearly everything.

I used to say, constantly, that they should study how the US does it, because it could all be so much more efficient.

Decades later, it’s still not efficient. But I understand something now I didn’t back then. So many of us fall for Italian culture hard, and for good reason. So many Americans move here, and once the shine wears off, the bureaucracy is exactly where the culture shock hits.

Here’s the thing I finally got, though: the stuff that drives us insane about this culture exists precisely because of the stuff we love about it. Make it efficient, and you lose the thing that made it worth loving in the first place. Once that clicked for me, I stopped fighting it. It’s a trade I’d make every time.

Next up: Part 16, Two Weddings and a Funeral.

Until then, drop your comments below. I read every one of them.