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d’identità, which requires you to have a permesso di soggiorno obtained from the questura of the province in which you wish to be resident, which requires you to have a visa, which you have to obtain in person from the Italian consular office closest to your official American residence: in DL’s case Los Angeles, in MM’s case Miami.) If you didn’t have an Italian driver’s license, your only options were either to ask an Italian friend to buy a car for you, then sign a document giving you the right to drive it, or to bring in a car from another country—yet if you did this, after four months you would still be obliged to replace the foreign license plates with Italian ones, which required an Italian license.
    Many countries have reciprocity agreements for licenses with Italy; the United States, unfortunately, is not one of them, since there is no federal driver’s license, and it would be bureaucratically untenable for Italy to make separate agreements with each of the fifty states. As a result, even drivers who, like us, had had licenses for almost a quarter of a century were compelled to take the driving test. In Italian.
    Wanting advice, we called Elizabeth, since we knew she had gotten an Italian license several years earlier. “Oh, it was easy,” she said. “I just paid someone to take the test for me.”
    â€œBut how can someone take it for you?”
    â€œOnly the oral part. What you do is you pretend you don’t speak English and explain that you’ve brought along a translator. Of course he isn’t really a translator.
You mumble to him, and he answers all the questions. It costs about two million lire.”
    Neither of us was particularly keen to pay two million lire to a “translator.” Nor did we believe that we needed one, even if Elizabeth had. After all, we both spoke Italian. We were good drivers.
    A lawyer explained to us how we ought to proceed. Since obviously we didn’t want to go to a driving school, we needed first to get in touch with an agente. An agente was basically someone who made his living mediating between bureaucracies and human beings. Little of a practical nature could be done here without one, since the system was so baroque that learning to negotiate even a small region of it required years of study.
    The agente our friend recommended was named Bruno. He wore wraparound sunglasses and had a cashmere coat. To obtain licenses, he said, we would first have to complete a pratica (form). This would cost two hundred thousand lire. After that we would take an eye exam from a doctor who would then affirm that we were both in good health. This would cost one hundred and fifty thousand lire. After that, Bruno would make an appointment for us to take the oral exam. If we passed it, he would make an appointment for us to take the driving test—the one behind the wheel.
    Now the comedy began. First, we went to take the eye exam. The doctor who administered it turned out to be practically blind. (Perhaps he’d gotten his license in Pescara.) He could barely read our passports through his thick glasses or the clouds of smoke from his cigar. So far as we could tell, he was able to give the exam only because he had memorized the chart.

    Once we received the necessary certificates, Bruno made an appointment for us to take the teoria —the “theory” portion, given in the form of an oral exam. When? we asked. In a little more than two months, he told us. Two months! He shrugged—there was a long waiting list—and added that in France the wait was usually four months. Then he gave us foglie rose (pink slips of paper) permitting us to drive during the interval. He also gave us a manual of road regulations to study, along with a book of sample written tests. These tests had a reputation forbeing almost sadistically difficult, mostly because they exalted the principle of the trick question. An example:
    When