La Dolce Vita and Why It Doesn’t Actually Translate
Notes on Culture, Permission, and Living Well Now, Not Later.
I spent last week in Rome. I do not know Italy well at all, and yet it has always felt familiar. I felt strangely at home there, mostly because I could be expressive without apologising for it.
Maybe it is shared values. A shared sensibility. A mutual appreciation for good food, ritual, and taste, something I can thank my French side for. But more than that, I have always felt that Italians live well in a way that feels instinctive rather than learned.
It does not feel curated or carefully engineered. It is woven into daily life so deeply that it barely registers as a choice.
The slower pace. Recipes passed down through generations. A morning espresso taken standing at the bar. Lunches that stretch into the afternoon. We romanticise an idea of Italy, and while reality is far more complex, something still holds true. Pleasure is not something to earn, schedule, or postpone. It is folded into the day as it already exists.
It feels simple. And yet almost impossible to replicate.
The Packaged Ideal
Culture is not aesthetic. It is accumulated habit, climate, history, language, religion, economics. You cannot import the terrace without importing the structure that sustains it.
What reaches us is the packaged version. The edit. The exportable ideal. And we buy into it because it offers something we quietly lack: permission to live well without justification.
Just think about how successfully Aperol has sold Italy in a bottle. Sunlight, leisure, orange glow, all contained in something you can order at a London bar.
“The sweetness of doing nothing”
There is an Italian expression, la dolce far niente.
The sweetness of doing nothing.
Easy for an Italian. Incredibly uncomfortable for almost everyone else.
Outside of Italy, it does not quite translate. Especially if you’re British. That doesn’t make us bad or wrong. It simply means we’re different.
English language was not built to hold states of being in the way Latin languages are. It was built to resolve meaning quickly. To ask what something is for. To move forward.
We struggle with doing nothing unless it’s a holiday, a weekend, or something safely labelled as laziness.
We inherited a culture built on keeping calm and carrying on. Whether we accept it or not, that shapes how comfortable we are with stillness and pleasure.
Life now is organised around output, optimisation, and speed. Time is measured and justified. Even rest is expected to serve a function. Even pleasure is framed as a reward or recovery tool, something that helps us return to productivity. In that context, doing nothing does not feel sweet. It feels irresponsible.
But when Italians speak about doing nothing, they are not referring to laziness, they are describing presence. Allowing time to stretch without guilt. Being fully inside a moment that is not productive or impressive. That phrase exists because the culture protects it. The infrastructure holds it.
Optimisation and Accountability
That is not to say Italy has avoided modern life. It has simply resisted allowing optimisation to reorganise everything.
Pasta is a good example. It hasn’t been endlessly updated. It has been protected. Not out of resistance to progress, but out of respect for what already works.
That same respect applies to everyday rhythm. Long lunches remain. Shops close. Evenings stretch. Not because efficiency or optimisation was never considered, but because those rhythms serve something deeper than productivity.
I noticed this when we were out for dinner at 9.30pm on a monday evening. The restaurant we ended up in was full of locals, I had a large plate of delicious fresh pasta that was actually very reasonably priced and a glass of wine that was rather generous. The table next to us was filled with a large family, the grandparents were there too. Plates were passed back and forth. Food kept coming, and even past 10pm - shocking. And there was no sign of them leaving any time soon.
I loved it. Mostly because I’m not used to seeing that in London. And what stayed with me was how little explanation was required. No one questioned why we stayed so long, ate so slowly, or let the evening stretch into itself. There was no sense that enjoyment needed justifying, or that time had to be defended. In London, moments like this tend to come with an excuse or some form of reason. We explain why we deserve them. We frame them as treats. We save them for later. Even rest must prove its usefulness.
I don’t want to postpone enjoyment. I don’t want it to sit somewhere in the future, waiting for a holiday or a milestone. I want to live with it now, as things already are. And the truth is, I do. Rome just made me realise how much time I spend explaining that. Softening it. Making it sound reasonable. Translating something that, there, doesn’t need translating at all.
Our circumstances are different, of course. Italy isn’t perfect and London isn’t broken. But I have always instinctively prioritised enjoyment. Not in a reckless way. Not at the expense of ambition. I just never felt that building something meant I had to rush through my own life in the process.
Rome didn’t change how I live. It clarified it.
A reminder to live well now, not later. Not only when in Rome.