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I lived this as an Italian trying to do the same for an American wife.

I had already steeled myself for the experience but it was still mind-numbing, until the appearance of one glorious stroke of luck.

The official in our consulate had incurred some minor peccadillo in the filling out of a form - their stamp was in the wrong part of the document, and because of that, their counterpart in Roma had officiously refused the document.

Suddenly, what had been a grinding war of attrition between us and the establishment, turned into a civil war within the machine. A principal adversary had flipped to our side.

We had serious firepower and the rest of the process was made incredibly easy, as our slighted new friend slashed through the red-tape and bulldozed our application through.

It ended with the final document being stamped at least a dozen times out of spite. I wish I had that copy (it probably rests in an aging manila envelope in the comune somewhere.)

Just consult a report like this one https://www.transparency.org/en/gcb detailing the percentage of people who said they had to pull favours / personal connections to access public services... You can only begin to imagine how incredibly damaging it is to everything, from economic efficiency to the perpetuation of the culture of caciquism.

That inefficiency is how a open hand looks like

?

At Politecnico Milano (kinda Italy's MIT) they have this nice display for visitors where kids can pull out drawers of stuff representing different majors you can take. One drawer is for management or administration or something like that. It's filled to the brim with all sorts of rubber stamps.

Italy bureaucracy loves stamps.

> then even though I wrote the vows myself in Italian, just because I am American we had to have it translated by someone else back into English, by hand, just so I understood the vows I had myself written. We then had to contract someone to read the vows out loud in English at the ceremony so I understood my own words.

I badly want to learn the historical reason for this insistence that non-Italian-speaking foreigners must understand the contract they're entering into. They wouldn't put up these hoops to jump through unless someone's gotten badly burned in the past, right?

In Hungarian courts a contract that you cannot read is invalid, or at least, highly contestable in court. So translations are needed. I guess it must be the same in many other jurisdictions.

I can confirm this, when dealing with a Hungarian court I was asked repeatedly whether I understood what was going on and what exactly I was agreeing to. I did, but it was good of them to check.

Of course, otherwise you might end up with a hovercraft full of eels ;)

This would support the counterparty requiring a translation, but doesn't explain why the bureaucracy would need it.

because the bureaucracy also cares that the contract is valid.

There are probably all kinds of tricks you could pull by being married for a bit, then declaring the marriage false all along, but not going through the official divorce process.

A contract is between parties. The governments role is to arbitrate in the case of disputes not to help craft the original document and ensure understanding.

Not in the case of this contract, because it also enables the parties to, for example, become eligible for government incentives to be married.

Isn't this a case of "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"?

Requiring both parties to prove they understand the contract is probably more cost-effective in terms of, well, cost - and time - than it is to actually go on to litigate things.

Perhaps, but it's simply not the way things have been done. For example, I cannot imagine a legal infrastructure that would allow people to understand Terms Of Service. And that is with everyone using their own language.

> I badly want to learn the historical reason for this insistence that non-Italian-speaking foreigners must understand the contract they're entering into. They wouldn't put up these hoops to jump through unless someone's gotten badly burned in the past, right?

Turn the situation around. Rich Italian imports wife from poor country, … easy to imagine how that can lead to all sorts of bad situations. It’s one of the ways human trafficking for prostitution happens.

I don't know if that makes a significant difference for that purpose.

It's not like places where weddings take place are conspicuous enough that you couldn't tell the difference between them and a normal govt agency, and it's not like people don't know it is a very bad idea to sign documents where they do not even understand a single word.

The paper trail of a vanilla (let alone international) marriage is already big enough that I doubt criminals would want that, unless they have corrupt officials assisting them, which is a problem these measures do not address.

> it's not like people don't know it is a very bad idea to sign documents where they do not even understand a single word

The laws are there for people who may feel like they don’t have much choice in the matter. And yes lying to officials that you did in fact have a choice and are totally doing this of your own free will and yes of course you understand the document you’re signing is a big part of it.

This is similar to how some pregnancy related health clinics have things like “Sign the sample cup with blue pen if all good, use the red pen if you’re being forced to be here”

> This is similar to how some pregnancy related health clinics have things like “Sign the sample cup with blue pen if all good, use the red pen if you’re being forced to be here”

Oh, neat, I'd ever heard of that before.

Since OP can seemingly already write Italian, cynically, this seems like an effort on Italy's part to keep some foreigners out. Although I can also see how it could have come about with good intentions to protect all parties involved. IANAIL, but by making sure everyone understands a contract right before they sign it, you might save the courts some headache later. It also gives an easy job to a translator.

It's actually somewhat similar in Germany. You need a Ehefähigkeitszeugnis, essentially that document proving that you are not married yet. You would have needed to get this from the US.

Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US), you then instead need to apply to your local Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) for an exemption.

All the way, any foreign government documents need to be notorized by the German embassy in that country.

> Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US)

They don’t? I thought this was a pretty standard sort of document to get…

It is, the GP is wrong, its called a Statement Of No Marriage, many states can provide this.

I can't speak to whether that would qualify in Germany, but it seems like it'd be pretty easy to establish residency in some state for the explicit purposes of getting one of these if you were committed to this for some sort of scam or something.

I am seeing different things online about this, de.usembassy.gov says "no such government issued document exists in the United States", but maybe they are referring to the federal government.

In any case it say that since 2021 Germany will accept a sworn oath from US residents to declare their eligibility.

No, I had to do this when I moved to Europe with my non-married fiancee.

Some states can give you a statement saying "This person never has gotten married in our state", but they cannot pull the records of every state. In fact, the state that I was living in could not even do that -- only individual counties could pull records saying "This person did not have a wedding within this county". There are no central records.

When I tried to use that as a record of non-marriage, it was not accepted for the above reasons. My fiancee and I needed to give a signed oath to a notary that we were not married, and take that document to the state's office to be apostilled.

Well, if they want a federal document that makes sense, and yeah I don't think the fed issues that, we're too stratified so there's no such thing as a federal marriage license afaik.

I think the real issue is that what they want is a document that the person is not married. A state document might work if states required and tracked documentation for out-of-state marriages of residents, and could confirm that the person was a resident who would be subject to that requirement and was not, per records, married, whereas what the documents offer is documentation that an event did not occur within the state, not the absence of the condition of being married.

Yes, it is. Usually, a certificate that says, "No record of marriage of this person in this county". Though, there is still a step to apostille and translate it to German for German cities to use it.

I don't know how common it is, but this is a page of the Stuttgart court:

https://oberlandesgericht-stuttgart.justiz-bw.de/pb/,Lde/Sta...

- Countries without a link they have no info

- Countries with a link, but are cursive, generally provide the certificate in most cases (this seems to be broken, I see no cursive ones, but the UK is among this group, which one can see when opening the link; but that seems to be the minority).

- All others they seem to suggest need to go through the exemption process.

Virtually all common law countries provide this easily, and civil law countries provide a slightly different worded document of similar usage, i.e. a certificate of being eligible to marry under your country law. In most cases they are treated as equal once you have them, although the procedures and conditions vary.

How does one prove one isn’t married? Is it a sworn statement, or is there something else?

At both my European countries you can request an official document confirming your unmarried status at the city hall, and more recently, online.

Obviously, all the bureaucracies that require such a document also have a mechanism to issue it.

> and then even though I wrote the vows myself in Italian, just because I am American we had to have it translated by someone else back into English, by hand, just so I understood the vows I had myself written.

Are you a native Italian speaker? If not, this makes perfect sense. It is routine for someone to attempt to say one thing in a foreign language while actually saying something completely different.

What the difference between a solution and an elegant solution. A solution will fix the problem even if that means creating another problem. An elegant solution fixes the problem without creating another problem.

I can see how a non-native speaker might get themselves in trouble. I admit I have no idea what the correct solution is but I don't think this is it.

How could the solution be anything else? If the problem is "we want this person to understand this document", what are you going to do besides translating the document into the person's language?

Marriage generally has a fixed definition by law, anything else would be madness.

The vows shouldn’t matter.

Not italian and not a lawyer, but I can see how specific declarations made to another party in front of hundreds of witnesses, in the framework of entering a broader agreement with said party, could be argued as a verbal supplementary contract in case of future disputes!

Quite a few EU citizens travel to Denmark nowadays to get married to foreign nationals. Much less complicated and since Denmark is in the EU they won't have any problems to get it recognized in their home country.

We got married in DC. It was probably the easiest way someone can get married outside of a common law marriage in Montana (you just live as a couple and say you're married). DC requires no witnesses, no vows, and you self-officiate. We went to the courthouse, waited about 15 minutes for a clerk, and got the application after about 10 minutes of the clerk typing into the computer. For some reason, you aren't allowed to sign application in the courthouse so we walked down the street to National Portrait Gallery, signed it in the cafe, and dropped it in the mailbox when we got home. It was ridiculously easy and took longer to get to the courthouse than it took to get married. We had a real ceremony a few days later for family and friends. It actually took some convincing of our relatives that yes we were actually married and no, no one actually witnessed it.

Knowing both Italy and Germany, they are 2 different things: Italy is messy, Germany bureaucratic. Both are bad. But the fact that Italy is “known” to be messy, and Germany “known” to be “efficient” is what is perplexing.

Germany is the hell if bureaucracy, and is getting messy.

Like Sparta abusing Thermopylae for creed, Germany seems to ride a sorta-nostalgic idea built by prussian state introducing more modern information systems in 19th century and other efficiency-improving things.

Personally I found all germanic-country centered companies to be very disorganized in practice...

>in Italy, a wedding is a contract

Last time I checked it is a contract just about anywhere, including the United States. Marriage rights are primarily property rights. (or "liabilities", ask any divorce lawyer).

It's not the same. In the US marriage issues are handled in civil court via contract law, that's true. But in Italy, a marriage literally involves an actual contract that you write in longhand and sign. You wedding vows are part of that contract. AFAIK infidelity etc. is a breech of contract.

In the US marriage involves submitting a marriage application (a short form) and appearing before a clerk. Marriage is a license from the state. At any rate, the difference in bureaucracy could not be more stark.

But why didn't you just get legally married in the US (and have a faux celebration in her home town)?

You've not dated an Italian, have you. :-)

I haven't had the pleasure, no, please say more :)

Please indulge us and say more! :D

FYI, currently in italy the time to get your passport renewed (not even issued, renewed) is around 8 months and you have to book an appointment in order to do so

This is why people increasingly get married privately and then have a non-legal ceremony later however they want, to avoid government garbage like this.

The US portion of that is the same if you get married in Greece. I'd guess it's the same everywhere.

Had to get my Greek marriage documents translated as well.

All my italian friends who moved to Germany tell me that in Italy it's much easier than germany. Just FYI