A retired Scots-Italian architect who bought a holiday home in Italy to escape Brexit says she may have to wait up to 10 years to fully enjoy it as she works towards citizenship Room.

Sonia Romano (not her real name), from Edinburgh, last year bought a €150,000 (£128,000) two-bedroom country cottage with a balcony in the Tuscan countryside near Siena. There are olive groves and cost an extra €10,000 (£8,500). Transformation.

The 77-year-old also bought an attached cottage where farmers used to raise sheep for €6,000 (£5,100), which she plans to convert into an architect’s studio to continue working for Italian clients specializing in luxury designs swimming pool.

However, although her father was Italian, he did not pass citizenship on to his daughter and Ms Romano only had a British passport. She now faces various bureaucratic hurdles in obtaining an Italian passport, which she says could take up to a decade to resolve.

Ms Romano said: “I would probably be dead before I could get Italian citizenship, so at the moment if I travel to Europe I’m doomed to the 90-day rule unless I manage to get a pensioner visa.” I.

Post-Brexit travel rules state that non-EU citizens can only spend 90 days in the EU out of every 180 days.

Ms Romano’s Neapolitan father moved to Scotland 85 years ago, worked as a pizza chef and married a Scottish tailor.

But he did not pass his citizenship on to his daughter, and Ms Romano only had a British passport. She now faces bureaucratic hurdles in obtaining an Italian passport, which she says could take up to a decade to resolve.

First, the widow faced the difficulty of re-registering in Scotland as an Italian born there. She will then have to contend with slow Italian immigration offices and an increase in applications after Brexit.

Ms Romano said she did not want to live in the UK after Brexit and dreamed of spending the rest of her life in Tuscany.

“Britain is going through hell, and the economic crisis caused by Brexit has left many Britons sleeping in the middle of the road. Deep down, I’ve always felt more European than British,” she said.

“The problem was that when I was born in Edinburgh, my parents registered me as a Scottish newborn, not an Italian one, so my father’s Italian citizenship was broken.”

She believes her parents wanted her to be Scottish because until a few decades ago, Italian immigrants were sometimes “disparaged by local communities and often discriminated against, making it harder for them to find work”.

Ms Romano hired an immigration lawyer in Rome who told her that to apply for Italian citizenship she would first have to re-register as an Italian born in Britain 70 years ago and obtain a new birth certificate.

Ms Romano said: “It’s crazy, it’s really hard to correct a birth certificate in the UK, let alone after so many years, and you can basically do it if your father or mother’s details are wrong.” “Waging a battle simply because I wanted to change my parents’ decision to register me as Scottish at birth was difficult.”

Ms Romano said the amount of paperwork required was enormous, as it could take up to four years to find her father’s birth registration and documents proving his Italian nationality and ancestry in Naples.

Once she gathered the documents, she would have to deal with the Italian consulate in Edinburgh, which has a huge backlog of citizenship applications.

“Many Scots of Italian descent who applied for citizenship after Brexit can now apply for citizenship It takes four to five years to get. So all in all, this means I might have to wait 10 years to become Italian. ” she says.

Meanwhile, Ms Romano, who travels between Edinburgh and Tuscany every two months, has also applied for an Elective Residence Visa (ERV), which she hopes will be available while she waits for her Italian passport.

The ERV applies to non-EU expats with passive income from pensions and foreign property rentals of at least €31,000 per year for one person.

“Given that my pension is €50,000, I should have a higher chance of getting it,” Ms Romano said, adding that it might only take a year, but the hope was still slim.

“But it has to be updated every year, which means endless, cumbersome paperwork and bureaucracy.

“On top of that, it was very difficult to get an application because the Italian authorities are very picky about applicants and tend to favor those with the highest passive income, which was not the case in my case.”