Il dolce far niente

Why being Italian is a state of mind.

Spoiler alert: I’m not Italian, despite my best efforts.

Yes, I’m an espresso addict. I inhale pasta. Pizza. Gelato. Tiramisu. Cornetti. Limoncello. A good Bellini. A classic negroni. San Pellegrino. Brunello Cucinelli. Tod’s. My shelves bulge with books on Italian architecture, store signs, Capri, Tuscany, and the Amalfi Coast. I even have a book called How to be Italian, right next to the country’s Monocle guide.

Despite all of this effort, though, I somehow stubbornly remain Australian with a side of British and US citizenship. Am I disappointed? Nah. But I do love pretty much all things Italian. Because while all countries have some combination of amazing food and great fashion and beautiful locations, what separates Italy is that’s all wrapped in a pretty incomparable outlook on life. And I find that so familiar and comforting because—and I’m going out on a long and perhaps slender limb here—Australia shares some of that approach, whether by design or osmosis.

When I landed in the States from Sydney in 2001, two things were immediately apparent. First, coming from a country where the tall poppy syndrome reigned, the degree of self promotion seemed astonishing. I genuinely couldn’t quite believe it—was everyone like this?!—and immediately felt like it really wasn’t enough to just be good at what you do if you expected to be rewarded. And second, the go, go, go, go mentality made Sydney look positively sleepy. I didn’t think I was that casual or laid back, but compared with my new countrymen and women I was like a east-coast-transplanted Jeff Spicoli.

Two decades later, my take on both has shifted. I’m reluctantly self-promotional—I mean, I write here and hope at least one other person reads it, after all. And I fully recognize good, hard work often goes completely unrewarded, while people talking a big game often get promoted. It’s not fair, but that’s life. As for the go, go, go, go mentality, the US still has it—if I was a convert, I’d call this my side hustle, minus the “getting paid” part. But I’ve realized a lot of people are reluctant hustlers, maybe even unwitting. As Kirsten Powers noted a couple of weeks ago, there’s a “learned helplessness”—she was referring to a raft of issues Americans no longer think of changing, and I’d throw “drowning in credit card debt and running their bodies into the ground, chasing success and stability” into that bucket.

Australia? Well, all countries have their share of “work hard, play hard” types. Forever have, forever will. But there’s definitely a generally more relaxed pace of life accompanied by a healthy skepticism about work for the sake of work. This is the country, after all, whose Prime Minister declared “any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum!” after Australia wrested the America’s Cup from the clutches of the New York Yacht Club for the first time in 132 years.

Is Australia’s lifestyle a function of climate? Isolation? Our larrikin spirit? Has it always been like that? Or is there something to be said for the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who flocked to Australia after World War II, bringing with them ingrained values about the primacy of family, the importance of community, and the passion of soccer, er, leisure?

Some 4.2 million immigrants came to Australia from 1945 to 1985, about 40% from the United Kingdom and Ireland. But the second biggest source? Italy, with roughly 400,000 people (in 1985, Australia’s population was little more than 15 million). Today. more than a million Australians are of Italian descent—around 4.4% of the country’s 25.7 million people.*

Maybe it’s a stretch, but I see parallels between the culture I grew up in and what the Italians beautifully and famously call il dolce far niente, or the “sweetness of doing nothing.” ** Now, that’s not literal—Italians are very active while doing nothing. But it’s an American bizarro world in that what they’re doing is most definitely not work. It’s espresso and a cornetti in the morning, gossiping at the cafe. A long lunch rather than one eaten at your desk. Catching up with friends for a drink after work, morphing into dinner. It’s taking the month of August off to revel in the heat of the soon-to-fade summer. And it’s doing all of this completely unapologetically.

“[It] has always been a cherished Italian ideal,” Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in her bestselling Eat, Pray, Love. “The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement. You don't necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either.”

That is, of course, a critical point. And while Americans are famous for working crazy hours—and seemingly viewing it as a badge of honor—a glimmer of reevaluation has taken place since the pandemic … among the wealthy. The lower paid are required to work as hard as ever, while America retains it dubious status as the only industrialized nation on the planet that doesn’t guarantee minimum paid vacation time or paid public holidays.

“This year, Washington University researchers concluded that, since 2019, rich Americans have worked less. And less, and less,” the journalist who coined the term ‘workism,’ Derek Thompson, wrote in the Atlantic. “In a full reversal of the past 50 years, the highest-educated, highest-earning, and longest-working men reduced their working hours the most during the pandemic. According to the paper, the highest-earning 10 percent of men worked 77 fewer hours in 2022 than that top decile did in 2019—or 1.5 hours less each week. The top-earning women cut back by 29 hours. Notably, despite this reduction, rich people still work longer hours overall.”

So, it’s not exactly a win-win, but progress is progress. I’m not sure I was ever in the go, go, go, go working group—my inherent cynicism about work prevented that. But I’ve absolutely worked my share of late nights and early mornings; Christmas days and New Year’s Eves. I’ve stood up friends and missed events to stay at my desk, and sometimes you’ve just gotta do what you’ve gotta do. I’m not an hourly worker who clocks on or off—you have to work when work has to be done.

But the balance has definitely shifted as I’ve aged. When I think about what I admire about Italy, it sure as heck isn’t the utterly dysfunctional political system or the travails of the Ferrari F1 team (maybe 2024 will be the turnaround!). It’s the attitude. The culture. The hard-won wisdom about what’s truly important in life distilled from thousands of years of experience.

Ironically, for all the eloquence about Italy, my general take on why this matters comes from the Dalai Lama, who was once asked what surprised him most about humanity: “Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

Have that morning espresso and a sweet treat. Close the laptop and eat a real lunch—the company won’t collapse. Cherish and cultivate friendships, without it feeling like a chore. Have dinner with people (or a person) you love, with your phone turned off, in a Faraday bag, embedded in cement, and dropped to the bottom of a lake. Get some sand between your toes. Take a good look at the beauty that surrounds you, and be grateful. And, by all means, take vacations—lots of them. But remember: they ultimately won’t save you if the other 50 weeks each year are insane.

Il dolce far niente, baby. Get on it. Now, where’s my passport?

* Melbourne is the home of Australia’s famous coffee culture and you can trace the whole shebang to the espresso machine installed in the still-standing Pellegrini’s in 1954 (although, like most stories of this nature, it’s the subject of hot dispute). Melbourne also happens to have the largest Greek-speaking diaspora outside of Greece or Cyprus, the result of immigration throughout the 20th century and especially after World War II.

** I long ago adopted dignita dovere e divertimento as my personal motto: dignity, duty, and fun. Checks out.

A note about whatever this is …

After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.

Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.

Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.