It's not all lost
Sunday Espresso VII.
Buona domenica!
Mama, papa, two kids, sitting at the café across from where we were having a post-midday cappuccino (I know, sacrilege!). They ordered lunch, which hasn’t arrived yet. Normally, anyone else would be talking to each other. Well, not them. They were looking at their phones, all on their own, not even looking up. Then food came, so they were forced to look up and put down their phones. Oh, sorry, no, obviously, they had to take a picture of their pasta, then pose for a cheerful selfie, holding their spritz and soda. Like if they are having the time of their lives. They ate their food; one of them commented, “Oh, it’s good.” That was all the talk. Then they went back to their phones, paid, then walked away. The kids were still swiping while walking.
It’s an unimaginably sad scene, to be honest. And it’s every day during this summer, here in Pietrasanta. I don’t see this scene off-season. You can tell who’s not local by many tell-tale signs. Looking at you, Mr. White Socks With New Balance Shoes, Logo T-Shirt, Khaki Shorts. But the best way to tell? The ones who are glued to their phones while they are sitting in a beautiful piazza by the sea. They are not even documenting every second of their time, like if content creation would be mandatory, or their content would be unique in any way (it’s not). They are just swiping, like gambling addicts.
Meanwhile, Italians are conversing loudly, speaking to each other, arguing 10 minutes about which red wine they should order, and almost no one is checking their phones. To be honest, there are not even out, no phones on the table, no one is holding it like their wallets. It’s somewhere in their bags, pockets, or else. Hidden. Unscrollable.
I moved here from a country glued to screens, and the contrast was one of the first thing I noticed, sometime in my first week, and it has not stopped being one of the things I love most about living in Italy. The piazzas are loud. People shout across them. Teenagers walk in groups, dressed up, talking over each other, almost none of them holding a phone. On the subway in Rome, on the tram in Torino, in the bar of my own small town in Versilia, the default position of the human face is pointed at another human face, not at a screen. I have lived in three Italian cities of three different sizes, and the rule has held in all of them. In Italy, almost universally, people don’t care about digital.
This “fact” has some side effects. The reason Italy looks this way is not that Italians are spiritually purer than the rest of us. It is that the country never finished digitalizing. Banking apps are a joke. Government portals require you to collect 10 pages of paper from 5 different sources, sign it, and walk it into an office where someone will re-enter the same data into a computer. Websites for half the businesses I deal with look like they were last updated in 2002 and built pre-dotcom bubble. If you want to book something, you call. At best, text. There are some exceptions, of course, but universally, I can safely say this: compared to countries like the US or UK, Italy is decades behind in digital infrastructure.
To be honest, it has some challenges if you live here, but the overall feeling is that, at least for me, this is the best place to be when the entire world is going fully digital and less human.
And let’s not pretend. All the modern amenities you actually use arrived here in the 80s and 90s and stopped arriving after that. The autostrada, the supermarket, the espresso machine in every bar, the small-engine car that fits down a medieval street, the regional train that mostly runs. Italy got those. And we also have parking, delivery, and taxi apps (most of them work), Amazon, and the net bandwidth is also manageable in most places, everywhere else, you get sat-net. The other elements? The living your life on social media? The angst on world news? The forever disruption, the grind, the endless work hours, and the rat-wheel like life? They are here too, but 10x less than elsewhere, I’m sure.
Here, life is not centered on connection but on participation.
The result is that an Italian piazza in 2026 feels closer to a piazza in 1992 than to one in any major capital outside Italy, with the benches full, the conversations loud, and the phones still tucked into pockets where they belong. If you have any kind of nostalgia towards the 80s and the 90s, like me, since I was born in 82, I can tell you, franky: not all is lost. It’s just hidden, mostly in places like Italy, where slow living is not a framed print in your study above your 27” screen, but a Tuesday.
With Sophia, we have a saying. The world is heading for total idiocracy through screens and isolation, and if there is one country that falls last, one country that holds out longest against the algorithm telling everyone what to think and where to look, it will be the one that never managed to install the algorithm properly in the first place. A country that could not be bothered with how many likes you have on your last Instagram post.
I hope they hold the line.
Peter
Pietrasanta, 14 June 2026
What’s new on our site: more love letters to port towns
I think it’s kinda an obsession at this point for me, but I continued my love letters on Italian port towns. First, it was Livorno. Now I went full love story with Genova. It’s rough, it’s harsh, it’s loud, it’s beautiful.
Our free database and travel planner app launched last week. Our goal is to cover all of the towns in there with this publication, but until we do, browse our hand-selected list of the best truly off-the-beaten-path Italian towns. Based on the database, there is also a travel planner app you can use to plan your next trip. All free.