Dolce far Niente
A few years ago, I was at a hotel bar in Florence, Italy, when a hot bartender smiled at me somewhat condescendingly and said, “Why don’t you sit still and enjoy your wine?”
“Sit still and enjoy my wine.” Who are you, my mother?
“You keep checking your phone, cleaning out your handbag, making a list on your napkin—lady, listen, just stop and enjoy the taste of your Chianti. It’s magnifico.”
Suck it, bartender. I have important things to do.
“Americans,” he said, “you are always busy, even when you have a delicious meal in front of you or a glass of wine in your hand.” (Are you reading this with an accent? Please do.) “You’re on your phones or computers. You call it multi-tasking, no? I call it being distracted. How do you really enjoy pleasure when you mix it with work?”
At this point, I was offended—I felt like he was scolding me and (damn it) ruining my fantasy of him whisking me away after his shift for a romantic dinner in some adorable trattoria. And anyway, distracted? I prefer to call it being productive.
But this is true: Italians are masters of living in the moment. If they’re working, they’re working. Period. If they’re not, they have no problem just being. They find pleasure in small things. Enjoy the present without worrying about what’s next. They know how to stop. And breathe.
One Italian named Manu told me, “You will never see an Italian eating and working at the same time. We consider food and drink to be pleasure. So we work, and then we enjoy. But not both things together.” I’m not sure I totally buy this philosophy, but he might have a point.
They have a phrase in Italy: “Dolce far niente.” In English, it means “the sweetness of doing nothing.” When I first heard this, I honestly didn’t understand how doing nothing could be sweet; my type A personality often has me working on overdrive and trying to kill as many birds with as few stones as possible. Doing nothing sounded like a prison sentence.
But I’m discovering that there is something is something restorative about the art of idleness. I’ve been traveling solo in France and Italy for the past 10 days, and while disconnecting from my laptop for that long seems impossible (clearly I’m on it right now), I’ve made a point to find idle moments when I’m not touring, multi-tasking, or working. Moments when I stop. And breathe.
For example, I drank a glass of wine one night at my hotel bar in Paris and I purposefully left my phone in my room. It was just me, some French wine I couldn’t pronounce and, judging from body language, couples whispering sexy things to each other in words I didn’t understand. (I clearly didn’t see the description “romantic boutique hotel in the heart of Paris” before I booked my reservation.)
But I tried as best I could to sit and get lost in the moment—not my phone, my MacBook or my handbag. It was uncomfortable at first. I was fidgety. And nervous. But after about 15 minutes, I settled into my chair, and my wine, and I did something I rarely do in the states: I relaxed. I suck at relaxing, so I just don’t make much of a point of it usually. Why bother if I’m bad at it? It’s easier to just stay slightly stressed out all the time. I’ve perfected the art of busyness.
But in this moment, in the bar of my romantic boutique hotel in Paris, I relaxed. I did nothing but enjoy the taste of my wine, the Christmas lights reflecting off the wet pavement outside, and Frank Sinatra crooning in the background. I sat there for 60 full minutes of “dolce far niente.” I stopped doing something, and I sweetly did nothing.
I slept like a baby that night. To be honest, I don’t know if it was the dolce far niente or jet lag, but I do know this: I need more moments of sweet nothing in my life. Because, probably like you, I don’t stop enough. I don’t breathe enough. And I don’t let my mind and body relax enough. I have many goals for 2024. But at the top of my list is to find time to do nothing but savor the precious miracle of being alive. Because it is, you know? To feel my heart beat. To drink in the beauty of my surroundings. To be thankful for what I’ve been given. And to do it all with the passion of a charismatic, full-blooded bartender from Florence.
Cheers to a year of amazing productivity, hard work, reaching goals—and in the midst of all of that—the ability to stop. Breathe. And enjoy the sweetness of doing nothing.
