The articles written by the PÚBLICO Brasil team are written in the variant of the Portuguese language used in Brazil.
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For many Italians living in Portugal, the routine is the same. Almost daily, they enter the agencies’ scheduling page Italian diplomats to renew your Italian passport and the answer is: try another day.
Mariana Berutto51 years old, who has Italian nationalities and Brazilian, has been in this fight since September of last year. “As my passport was due to expire last May, I anticipated and tried to make an appointment, but it was impossible,” she says, who chose Lisbon to do a doctorate in history.
First, Mariana had difficulty registering at the consulate that uses a computer system called AIRE, a registry of Italian citizens with all the data, including name, address, profession, marital status, gender, affiliation and Italian location in which they are located. connected, which is mandatory.
After registering, she started trying, almost every day, to schedule a trip to the consulate. The answer was always negative and there was no possibility of joining the waiting list for a date. “It’s complicated,” says Mariana.
A similar situation faced the Italian Ella Sher, 45, who is a literary agent. “I tried for three months to make an appointment, but I couldn’t,” he says. Ella, who moved to Lisbon for family reasons, believed she would need a newer passport for a work trip to Mexico. In the end, after sending an email to the embassy complaining, he received information that her document was still valid for the trip.
Rio accent
The Italian consul in Lisbon, Simone Salvatore, recognizes the existence of the problem. “We have 30,000 Italian citizens residing in Portugal, but, until November last year, when I took office, only 150 passports were made per month, which is 1,800 per year. As the Italian passport is valid for 10 years, three thousand passports would be needed per year”, he says.
The diplomat highlights, however, that, given the high demand, he had to double the issuance of passports to try to reduce the waiting list. So much so that he is producing 300 documents per month — double what he initially estimated —, but there was a month in which the number reached 350.
Salvatore says he intends to modify the IT system for appointments, so that there can be a waiting list. “In the current situation, as the system refuses registrations after appointments have been completed, we don’t even know how many people want a passport and can’t get it”, he reports.
One of the concerns that the diplomat has is trying to assist Italians only when they really need a passport. This is because, if everyone who is in arrears were to obtain the document in a very short space of time, 10 years from now, when the validity of the documents ends, the problem would return.
40% Brazilians
According to ambassador Claudio Miscia, the number of Italian citizens in Portugal has grown in the last five years at an average of 10% annually. “Each year, 18% more citizens arrive and around 8% leave the country. 20 years ago there were only 3,000 living in Portugal, and none of them were born in Brazil”, he observes.
Now, this picture has changed. Miscia carried out a sample survey of the number of Italians born in Brazil who are living in Portugal, and the result was significant: 40%.
Asked if it is Italian-Brazilians who have contributed to clogging up the passport application queue, the ambassador says no. “We do not distinguish where citizens were born. They are all Italian”, says Miscia, himself the son of a Brazilian woman and with a bit of a Rio accent, despite being born in Italy.
