Allow yourself to do the dolce far niente anytime, anywhere
Sunday Espresso IV.
Buona domenica!
Last week, we visited Lucca. A city that doesn’t care about your selfies, and that’s why it’s a much better choice for tourists than an overcrowded Florence or even Pisa.
We took a picture of a guy (see below). We met him in a hat shop, which I was looking for anyway, because I’m a big sucker for Italian fedoras (I collect Borsalino hats, one of the last remaining vices I have…). He came in to have a short chat with the owner. Two locals who knew each other. We didn’t buy a hat, but later we sat down at the main square’s bar, Café Casali, and there he was again. He ordered a glass of water and an espresso, sat down, and smoked a toscanello for an hour. Doing nothing. A Tuesday afternoon. He wore even his hat carelessly, halfway tilted.
As a foreigner, I thought: this is very Italian, this is the dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. But it’s because I’m a foreigner that I think this way. I turn it into an identity thing. For him, it was a Tuesday.
Italian identity is hyper-local. Ask an American to tell you about themselves, and they start with what they do, the job, the work as identity. They might talk later about where they grew up, what they ate there, and so on. Ask someone near the Mediterranean, and they start from the opposite direction: I grew up in Lucca, still live here, I love this dish, I don’t trust people from Pisa. You learn what they do for a living by accident, weeks later. Identity here is the food, the dialect, the town, the city-state mind that has run for a thousand years. Yes, I know, Italy is a unified country now, but that’s barely over 150 years (165 now) of nationhood, after thousands of years of city-states…
Oh, and the dolce far niente? The phrase itself didn’t come from Italians making a philosophy of their afternoons. It became a famous thing during the Grand Tour Era, when northern European lords came south and found the way of living down here irresistible. 16th to 19th century, you know, when the Spanish, Dutch, and British did their empire things, getting rich doing so, so they started visiting countries for leisure, like Italy. And in Italy, they saw Italians aristocracy financing art (Renaissance), and aside from some minor wars between cities, they were busy doing nothing. Meanwhile, Northerners, accustomed to managing an empire, were amazed at how elegantly this could be done in Italy. They needed a name for it because they didn’t have one. Back home, everyone was high on the industrial revolution, trade, and empire, and here were people watching the sunset with a glass of wine after a day’s work. So they took the phrase home as something to envy. Maybe Byron named it first in a letter, and this is how it got sticky.
History detour. Northern empires were new ones, back then. Italy had one before, I’m sure everyone heard about it: the Roman Empire. We learn in schools that it fell, but the truth is, it just became hundreds of independent nations and city-states. What Northerners saw at that time was the basic definition of what we call now old money. If you look back at the Northern aristocracy, you see it now. Watch any episode of The Crown, and the British aristocracy is all about horse racing, hunting, and weddings. Dolce far niente level 1,000. And to poke your mind, just sayin’, much of the Italian aristocracy is still around, and yes, they live in the same palazzos Byron raved about back then, doing pretty much the same thing they did hundreds of years ago. It worked since the Medicis, why change, right? And the reason why Italy is one of the most popular destinations for travel is exactly this: the preserved, thousands-of-years-old culture that you simply can’t see elsewhere. Many countries have better beaches, and I would argue (please Italians, skip to the next sentence) that even some countries have better food. But no one has a Renaissance (and the Pope, but the influence of Catholicism in Italian culture and the world is a whole other story for next time).
Back to my point: nothing is faker than dolce far niente. My guy had his cigar in silence. But the waitress worked her shift to support the doing-nothing. Someone made the coffee. The foreigners who romanticized Italy saw rich men idle in their palazzi. They did not see the Maremma herders who made the beef, or the Chianti growers who made the wine for the evening, all of them working, then and now, because the food here tastes the way it does only because someone keeps doing the thousand-year-old work by hand. And the reason a certain kind of Italian can sit and do nothing is the same reason: the money was made, the empire run, the city-states won, centuries before most of Europe and long before America existed. The Romans, the Medici, the Doges, the Pope, and the Papal States. Old money sits easy.
Yet everyone is hyped about doing nothing.
It shouldn’t take a cigar, an espresso, and an hour in a piazza without your phone for a man to feel he’s allowed to stop. I’m not even sure my guy had a phone. We shouldn’t build a mythology around it, or fly to another country to be granted permission for it.
It should be just a Tuesday afternoon.
Alla prossima,
Peter
Pietrasanta, 24 May 2026
What’s new on our site: terme all the way
We are busy building something amazing for our readers, so we published less this week. Also, probably not the best timing for it, but we wrote some articles about thermal baths. We are originally Hungarians, so we have deep roots in thermal spa culture, which, as with most cultural things in Europe, is, of course, a product of the Romans (then adopted by the Turks, from whom we Hungarians got it).
Summer is, again, not the best timing for this, but we wrote about Montecatini and San Giuliano here:
Next week, we will launch some pretty good stuff. The epic collection of 1,000 best towns in Italy that you need to visit. Italy has around 8,000 towns. You know maybe 50 of them. We bring you the rest.
Am I doing this right?