Where have you been?

I’ve been sending out e-mails to announce You’ll never have me like you want me, the first book to be published by malafemmina press in 20 years and that’s the reply I got from one person. Why did it take so long? Because I spent a lot of those years in Italy and, in Italy, you can’t just roll out of bed and do stuff. You have to have permission.

How do you start a periodical in Italy?

Law number 47 of February 8, 1948 says that every periodical must have a direttore responsabile, responsible director. Basically, he’s the guy who gets into trouble if you print something the people in power don’t like. To become a direttore responsabile, you have to be a journalist. To be a journalist, you have to be listed in the Ordine dei Giornalisti, Order of Journalists (not a union). To be listed in the Order of Journalists . . .

After banging my head against the internet for a couple of weeks, I decided to speak to a human being who’s the direttore responsabile of a small local magazine.

There are two kinds of journalists: Giornalista Professionale, professional journalist, and Giornalista Pubblicista, publicist journalist. The professional journalist works only as a writer or editor. The publicist journalist does other work besides: publicity and/or films and other types of public diffusion of information.

To become a professional journalist you have to work for a periodical, where there are at least three journalists employed, for at least 18 months. Then you take a state exam. To become a publicist journalist you have to have published at least 80 articles in a two-year period and you have to have been paid at least a total of 3,000 euros. You have to be interviewed by the president of the Order of Journalists in your region and there’s a fee of up to 200 euros.

I went back to the internet. I found the information for the region of Puglia the easiest to decipher, so that’s what I give here. Although the details change from region to region, the laws are basically the same.

You have to submit an application to the local government, on carta da bollo, a paper with an official stamp that you get at the post office, which costs about 14 euros and 62 cents.

You have to pay 168 euros to the tax registration office of Rome. You have to pay 190 euros for Diritti di Segreteria. (I asked the Direttore Responsabile what you get for these fees and he said you get a receipt. I didn’t want to insist. I was hoping it was just a failure to communicate.)

You have to include the following documents:

—certification of residence: everyone in Italy, citizen, immigrant, or tourist, is required to register his or her presence with the police.

—certification of Italian citizenship: at one time, you had to be an Italian citizen; now it’s enough to be a citizen of the European Union. If you’re living in Italy as a foreign journalist, there are other laws you have to obey and other applications required.

—birth certificate.

—social security number.

You have to include, still in Puglia, the complete text of at least 30 signed articles that you’ve published in the preceding two calendar years. Somewhere on the internet I read that in Lazio it’s 80 articles, although I overheard a conversation in which a woman said that her son, who wants to be a journalist, has to publish at least 100 articles.

You have to have been paid for these articles and you have to show documents, officially signed and stamped, that show you’ve been paid.

You have to have a certificate from the direttore responsabile of the periodicals in which you’ve been published.

All your information has to be registered with the police.

And the list goes on.

According to article 45 of law 69/63, publishing without a direttore responsabile is a crime punishable by two years in jail and/or a fine.

If you survive the requirements and publish your periodical, you have to include in every issue, in addition to other, more appropriate information (such as date and issue number) the name and home address of the printer. And several copies of every issue have to be submitted to the police.

You can’t just do what I did in San Francisco when I decided to start publishing la bella figura. All I did was wake up one morning and say to myself, “I’m tired of people refusing to publish my work because they don’t think poetry about being Italian-American is worth paper and ink. I’m starting my own magazine.” And I didn’t even have to say it out loud.

Does anyone remember la bella figura? It was ten pieces of paper stapled together. It did pretty well for what it was—200 subscribers before the first issue was out and, in the end, a mailing list of 800. In Italy, I could have ended up in jail for it.

They think they’ve got freedom of the press in Italy. But, like Emilia says in You’ll never have me like you want me, trying to explain freedom to an Italian is like trying to explain color to a blind man.

Remind me to tell you what you have to go through to start a publishing company in Italy.