How a Street Cat in Rome Ended Up in My Living Room in Ohio

I fed her once. That was my mistake — or my best decision, depending on how you calculate these things.

Roma appeared outside the restaurant where I was having dinner on my third night in Rome. Small, gray, improbably fluffy for a street cat, doing the thing street cats do where they sit nearby and make it unclear whether they are interested in you or occupying nearby space.

I gave her half my fish.

She was at the same spot when I walked by the next morning.

I had nine days left in Rome. I told myself I was just feeding a stray cat, which is a thing many travelers do, which usually ends when they board their flight home.

By day seven, I had named her Roma, purchased cat food from a farmacia, and begun researching the logistics of international pet transport.

By day nine, I had contacted a Rome-based animal rescue organization that assists with exactly this situation — tourists who have formed attachments they cannot leave behind. They were not surprised. They handle several cases per year.

The US requires: a health certificate issued by an accredited veterinarian within ten days of departure, a microchip (ISO standard 15-digit), documentation of rabies vaccination (Roma needed her primary series before she was eligible). Most countries including Italy do not require a quarantine for cats entering the US, but the paperwork must be current and complete.

The rescue organization helped with Roma's vet appointment, microchipping, and vaccination documentation. An international pet transport service handled the cargo booking and airline coordination.

Total cost: approximately $800, including the transport service, vet fees, carrier, and airline cargo fee.

Roma arrived in Columbus on a February afternoon, cargo-cold and disoriented, in a carrier that smelled of the Rome rescue's facility.

She explored my apartment in widening circles for four hours. She found the heated throw blanket on the couch.

She has not appeared homesick. Cats, I've come to believe, don't carry geography the way we do. They carry warmth, food, safety, and the particular smell of one specific human.

She's been in Ohio for two years. She remains improbably fluffy.

International pet adoption is complex but achievable. Organizations like PetRelocation.com and International Pet and Animal Transportation Association (IPATA) members can guide the logistics.

Every country writes its own rules for importing a pet, and they differ enough that the single most important step is to check the destination country's official veterinary or agriculture authority — in the US, USDA APHIS, with the CDC governing animal-disease entry — before you book anything. Roma's paperwork above was specific to one cat, one country, one year; treat any figure or timeline you read, including mine, as a starting point to verify, not a checklist to copy.

That said, a few requirements show up almost everywhere:

Rabies-free and rabies-controlled countries frequently add a rabies antibody titre blood test with a mandatory waiting period after the draw, a step that can push the timeline out by months. Airlines set their own live-animal rules on top of the government ones; members of IPATA — the International Pet and Animal Transportation Association named in Roma's story — are professional shippers who coordinate exactly this. Because the steps are chained — chip, then vaccinate, then sometimes titre, then certificate — start early and let the required order drive your calendar.

An imported cat arrives with more to process than a shelter adoption from across town: a long flight, a temperature swing, and none of the scents it knew. Give it the same decompression most shelters and vets recommend for any new cat — one quiet room with food, water, a litter box and a place to hide — and let the cat set the pace. A widely used shelter framework describes the arc as roughly three days to stop hiding, three weeks to learn the routine, and three months to feel at home; treat it as a reminder to be patient, not a stopwatch.

Two practical priorities in the first days:

Roma took four hours and one heated blanket; most cats take longer, and a street-hardened adult may stay wary for weeks before deciding a new human is safe — which is normal, not a failing adoption.