Passports and issuing times: here is the ranking from Milan to Rome

Under the Madonnina and under the Mole, the same film is being shown as six months ago: 'The Long Wait'. The Milanese are waiting, as in April, for more than three months to get their appointment. The situation is also unchanged in Torino where citizens have to consider at least two months of waiting before they can cross the threshold of the police headquarters.

In six months, the already overcrowded passport agenda can even get worse: it happened in Trento where police headquarters and police stations are increasingly clogged, having gone from two months of waiting in April to over three months on 12 November. If we move from North to South, we see that Naples improves, so to speak, where the waiting time is just over a month compared to almost three months in April. The same goes for Genova, which, with almost two months of waiting, has emerged from the deep red of April when the platform gave no appointments available.

Since March, a priority agenda ('priority appointments') has been activated on the State Police platform where appointments for passport issuance or renewal are booked. This allows citizens who urgently need to leave within 30 days for documented reasons of health, study, work or tourism, to book and obtain their passport in time for their trip. This should make appointment management more efficient. The urgency procedure was already in place, but the citizen had to go to the police station without an appointment and queue hoping to find an available slot, clogging up police stations and police stations even more.

To ease the pressure on the Questuras and speed up passport issuing procedures, thanks to an agreement between Poste Italiane and the Ministry of the Interior, the passport application and renewal service will be progressively available in post offices throughout Italy from July. As is already happening in smaller municipalities, with fewer than 15 thousand inhabitants, where, as part of the Polis Project, financed with Pnrr funds, passport issuance or renewal has already been active since March. As emerged in a survey carried out by Altroconsumo on 12 November, in Cagliari and Bologna, where the passport application and renewal service has been active in post offices since August, the wait of 2-4 months recorded six months ago has gone from just one day to get the appointment at the police headquarters. This bodes well for the future, even if there are still only a few larger cities where it is active: Bologna, Cagliari, Verona and Rome have been active since August.

Recently, Poste Italiane announced that the service will soon be available in 32 other provincial capitals including Venice, Perugia, Monza, Parma and Reggio Calabria. There is even speculation of the opening of a few offices from January in Milan, a city in serious difficulty on the passport front with its 103-day wait, but in the list of enabled post offices on the Poste Italiane website, the consumers' association notes, there is no trace of the Milanese capital. There are also no signs of openings in Turin and Genoa, still considered the cities where there are the greatest inconveniences due to long waiting times.

Altroconsumo goes on to point out that making a passport at the Post Office entails higher costs: in addition to the 116 euros already charged for renewing and issuing the document, 14.20 euros must be added as an 'application fee'. Thus, a citizen using this service pays EUR 130.20 for a passport.

The consumers' association notes that the Italian passport is already among the most expensive in Europe. In fact, renewing a passport in Italy costs EUR 116 (EUR 42.50 to be paid to the Ministry of Finance with a postal order form and EUR 73.50 for the administrative stamp, which is bought at the tobacconist's), much more than in other European countries with the same period of validity (10 years). For example, in Spain it costs 30 euro and in Germany 60 euro. And Italy does not give discounts even to minors even if the passport lasts less. So says our analysis in which we compared the costs of passports in the main European countries. Finally, Altroconsumo points out that if you apply for the issue or renewal of your passport at a post office, you have to add €14.20 to the €116 for an undefined 'application fee'. Thus, if he uses this method, the citizen will shell out EUR 130.20 for the passport.