| All EU citizens are eligible to work in Italy. The two main
bureaucratic requirements are a libretto di lavoro and permesso di
soggiorno , respectively a work and residence permit, both available
from the Questura (police station). For the first you must have a letter
from your employers saying they are prepared to take you on; for the
second (which is also necessary if you want to buy a car or have a bank
acount in Italy), you'll need a passport, passport photos, and a lot of
patience. Work permits are pretty impossible for non-EU citizens to
obtain: you must have the firm promise of a job that no Italian could do
before you can even apply to the Italian embassy in your home country. A
useful publication to have is Live and Work in Italy by Victoria Pybus,
published by Vacation Work in the UK, costing £10.99, a comprehensive
guide and full of practical information.
Work
The obvious choice is to teach English , for which the demand has
expanded enormously in recent years. You can do this in two ways:
freelance private lessons, or through a language school. Private lessons
generally pay best, and you can charge around
£30,000-42,000/¬15.49-21.70 an hour, though there's scope for bargaining.
Advertise in bars, shop windows and local newspapers, and, most
importantly, get the news around by word-of-mouth that you're looking
for work, emphasizing your excellent background, qualifications and
experience. An advantage of private teaching is that you can start at
any time of the year (summer especially is a good time for
schoolchildren and students who have to retake exams in September); the
main disadvantage is that it can take weeks to get off the ground, and
you need enough money to support yourself until then. You'll find the
best opportunities for this kind of work in the tourist resorts and the
bigger towns and cities.
Teaching in schools , you start earning immediately. It usually involves
more hours per week, often in the evening, at a lower rate per hour,
though the amount you get depends on the school. Don't accept anything
less than £15,000/¬7.75 an hour (approximately £5/US$8), while the
bigger schools should pay much more than this. For the less reputable
places, you can get away without any qualifications and a bit of bluff,
but you'll need to show a TEFL (Teaching of English as a Foreign
Language) certificate for the more professional establishments. For the
main language schools, it's best to apply in writing before you leave (look
for the ads in the Guardian and Times Education Supplement , and contact
the Italian Cultural Institute), preferably before the summer, though
you can also find openings in September. If you're looking on the spot,
sift through the phone books and do the rounds on foot, asking to speak
to the direttore or his/her secretary; don't bother to try in August
when everything is closed. The best teaching jobs of all are with a
university as a lettore , a job requiring fewer hours than the language
schools and generally providing a fuller pay-packet. Universities
require English-language teachers in most faculties, and you can write
to the individual faculties (addressed to Ufficio di Personale).
Strictly speaking you could get by without any knowledge of Italian
while teaching, though it obviously helps a lot.
If teaching's not up your street, there's the possibility of courier
work in the summer, especially around the seaside resorts. These are
good places for finding bar/restaurant work , too - not the most
lucrative of jobs, though you should make enough to keep you over the
summer. You'll have to ask around for both types of work, and some
knowledge of Italian is essential. Au pairing is another option: sift
through the ads in The Lady to find openings.
Work, study and volunteer programmes
To begin, select a topic in the navigation bar to the left
Studying
One way of spending time in Italy is to combine a holiday with learning
the language, or taking one of many summer courses on myriad aspects of
Italian art and culture. There are a great many places where you can do
this, usually offering language courses of varying levels of intensity
for between one and three months
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