Dolce far niente: What Sicily taught me about doing nothing
Everyone knows la dolce vita. Fellini gave it to us in 1960: Anita Ekberg wading into the Trevi Fountain, Vespas, sunglasses, champagne at three in the morning. The sweet life is glamorous, a little reckless, and best lived in Rome. Here in Sicily, people talk more about something quieter: dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. They sound like cousins, but they’re not the same thing. La dolce vita is about having. Dolce far niente is about being. One needs a nightclub, and the other needs a chair in the shade. An old idea The idea is much older than the cinema. Nearly two thousand years ago, Pliny the…
What didn’t fit in this month’s letter from Sicily
I sat down to write this month’s letter of everyday life in Sicily, as I always do. I was thinking I would tell my subscribers about a birthday lunch in the Sicilian hills near Corleone. I did tell them that story. But it led me back to a village we visited years ago in South Africa, which in turn reminded me of Borgo Parrini, not far from Palermo. I told them how Parrini had come back to life after years of abandonment, and how we went into its bakery looking forward to buying bread but left empty-handed after spotting flies beneath the glass counter. I reported on the eleven new…
