On Sat, 8 Nov 2014, tim..... wrote:

A certificate of life?

You not come across this translation for "residency registration"

The Italian "form" also translates as "permission to live" if you do it
literally

I am not sure what you are talking of. The italian "permesso di
soggiorno" or german "Aufenthalterlaubnis" means rather literally
"permission to stay" (compare "soggiorno" with "sojourn").

We have (or had, I am not sure) a "certificato di esistenza in vita"
(lit. certificate of existence in life). It was the sort of the document
a pension fund paying a pension into a bank account would periodically
require to prove the recipient of the pension was still alive.
(if one did not want to show up at the bank counter in person).

Nowadays for relations between a citizen and the public administration,
or between offices of the public administration, it is sufficient to
sign a self-declaration ... it is actually forbidden to a public
administration office to require a certificate for an info they can
obtain directly from another office.

So certificates issued by the public administration can be requested
only by private organizations.

Of course all that is gold does not glitter, so I do not dare say that
things are THAT improved with things like the "informatic protocol" or
the PEC (certified e-mail, replacing registered letters).