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My boyfriend and I are UK residents and, come April, will have been staying in Italy in the same place for 3 months. We wish to stay an extra month but I'm not sure what is legally required. I understand some countries require you to apply for residency (of up to 5 years) or prove you have sufficient funds (€6,000) in your bank account (which we don't) after 90 days. Is this the case for Italy? We are technically just tourists, as we are both freelancers and are only working from our laptops for our UK clients.

We arrived here by plane from Vienna. If we were to travel to another country, would our 90 days reset in Italy, allowing us to return to Italy for up to another 3 months? If so, how long would we need to have left Italy for?

Any help and information anyone can provide would be hugely grateful. I haven't managed to find a black and white answer to this question anywhere.

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  • Welcome to Politics.SE. But please note that we generally only answer "big picture" questions about politics and political processes. We generally don't provide help for individual people navigating bureaucracies. However, Travel Stackexchange frequently answers questions about visa regulations. I will migrate the question there.
    – Philipp
    Commented Feb 7, 2018 at 15:13
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    Welcome to Travel.SE. To answer your question we have to know the citizenship for you and your boyfriend.
    – o.m.
    Commented Feb 7, 2018 at 16:19
  • If you are not a citizen or national of an EU or EEA country or of Switzerland, then if you stay for more than 90 days in the Schengen area during any 180-day period you can be fined, or even banned from entering the Schengen area for a time. This applies to the whole Schengen area, so if you spent any days in Austria before arriving in Italy, or in any other Schengen country during the three months before you arrived in Italy, you may already have exceeded your allowed period of stay. Having UK residency, as others have noted, does not help you in this regard.
    – phoog
    Commented Feb 7, 2018 at 19:31

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Italy is part of the Schengen travel zone and so is Austria. The UK is not.

  • A non-EU/EEA resident of one Schengen country can visit all other Schengen countries under the 90/180 rule, that is no more than 90 days out of the previous 180 days.

This condition must be fulfilled every single day. There is no reset. After 90 days in, you must stay 90 days out. (On the 181th day you could come back in since the first of the 90 days in was more than 180 days ago.)

But you are not a resident of the Schengen zone, I believe.

  • You are residents in the UK, not in a Schengen country. If you are also citizens of an EU/EEA country, your travel would be covered under the EU freedom of movement or freedom of establishment rules.
  • If you are not citizens of an EU/EEA country, either you need a visa or you have visa-free entry under the same 90/180 rule. You would need an Italian D visa.

Important: If you are an EU citizen who lives and works in Italy for clients elsewhere in the EU, you might already be an Italian resident for tax purposes. Talk to a competent tax counsellor now.

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