Last week Cathy, an English friend of ours who has a holiday house near Pontremoli, asked me if I could go with her to the Council offices. Her Italian is not fluent and she wasn’t sure if she was up to date with all the different council taxes and so on. So Monday morning we went to il Comune di Pontremoli (Pontremoli Council), which is situated in the town centre in an old 17th century building, a maze of staircases, dark corridors, and high vaulted ceilings. First of all we went to sort out the tax on rubbish collection, which is paid separately from the housing tax.

A narrow office with a tall window at the back which opens onto the river Magra and a backdrop of green hills, in the centre of the room a shabby old desk with a computer, and all around shelves and tables covered with wobbly towers of paper that seemed about to cascade everywhere. At the desk an old hippy with long grey hair. I introduced Cathy explaining that she hadn’t received a rubbish collection tax bill for this year. “La tassa dell’immondizia per il 2012 verrà spedita a metà settembre” (The tax on rubbish collection will be sent out in the middle of September) he explained. Then he looked on the computer to check whether the bill for 2011 had been paid: “No, non è stata pagata” (No, it hasn’t been paid), he said. He went to a shelf, narrowly avoiding an avalanche whilst  extracting a stack of envelops held together with a rubber band, quickly leafed through them, and unearthed Cathy’s bill: “Il sistema non mi permette di spedire i bollettini all’estero perché il CAP (codice di avviamento postale) è diverso: quello italiano ha cinque spazi mentre quello inglese ne ha sei” (The system doesn’t allow me to send the bills abroad because the post code is different: the Italian one has five spaces, whilst the English one has got six). Well that explained why Cathy had never received the bill!

While Cathy was opening the letter, I explained to the man that whilst the Italian post code identifies the local post office, the English post code identifies a block of houses in a certain road within a town, and if you type it into Google maps you can even find the actual building that it belongs to. “Interessante! Aspettate un attimo” (Interesting, wait a minute) he said. A few taps on the keyboard, a couple of clicks of the mouse, and then: “È questa la casa?” (is this the house?) he asked. We looked at each other, puzzled, and then looked at the computer screen and saw a satellite image of a group of houses in a little road in an English town. He was very excited about the discovery, and experimented for a bit with street view before remembering why we were there, and returning to the rubbish tax business. He checked Cathy’s payment record again and came to the conclusion that she hadn’t even paid for 2010. Cathy protested that she was sure that she had paid that bill, so he very kindly printed out the record, showed us how it worked, and then filled out a postal form for the amount due. Handing it to Cathy he said: “Però non lo paghi, prima controlli quando torna in Inghilterra se ha la ricevuta di pagamento. Se la trova, la prossima volta che torna in Italia me la porta e io provvedo a registrarla. Se non ha pagato, la paga la prossima volta che viene, anche l’estate prossima, non si preoccupi, tanto non c’è nessuna multa” (However, don’t pay it now, first of all check when you get back to England if you’ve got the receipt for the payment. If you find it, then next time you’re in Italy you can bring it to me and I’ll make sure it gets sorted out. If you haven’t paid it, you can pay next time you come here, even next summer, don’t worry about it because there isn’t any fine).

By this time Cathy, who isn’t very well versed in the strange and often lackadaisical workings of local councils in Italy, was beginning to feel a bit like she was participating in some kind of surrealist theatre. And we still had to try and sort out her housing tax. This, of course, meant starting all over again in another office two doors down the same corridor. But that’s another story!