Franco and The Sweet Life
From D’Annunzio to Dolce & Gabbana, ‘La Dolce Vita’ has always been complicated
It was lunchtime in Rome, and as he does every day, Franco was closing the shop where he restores antique furniture and retouches damaged sculptures and paintings. I was delaying him with my questions.
“You still pay rent, right? You still pay taxes. You still have to eat.” I wanted to understand why Franco shuttered his shop every August, two weeks each December, and -- as on that day -- for a few hours each afternoon.
A few weeks earlier, I’d read that Italy’s economy slipped a notch or two on the list of the world’s largest economies each August, when the country all but shuts down and most Italians go to the beach. I was planning a magazine piece on the topic and wondered whether Italians ever questioned their long tradition of enjoying so much down time.
But Franco -- gray-haired, in his 60s, with callused hands and thick, dusty glasses -- didn’t get my point.
I tried another angle: “Are you good at what you do?”
He nodded.
“Well,” I said, “then how would you feel about someone who does the same job as you earning more money? Not because he’s better at it, but because he lives in a country where people work in August, they work in December, and they don’t close the shop every afternoon.”
“That’s his choice,” Franco shrugged.
“Yes, exactly!” I grew up in the U.S. and knew the value of hard work and efficiency. To me, Franco’s choices seemed irrational. “The other guy makes that choice and so he’s more competitive than you, wealthier than you -- even though he’s not better at his job.”
“But I’m not trying to become wealthy,” Franco told me when I finished. “I’m trying to have a nice life.”
I should have stopped there. Instead, I doubled down.
“How nice will your life be when that other man buys you out?” I asked. “He’ll be able to afford a lifestyle you can’t.”
Franco studied my face for a few seconds, then sighed.
“Look, when I finish talking to you, which will be in about two minutes,” he said, pulling down the retractable steel grill over the glass shop door. “When I finish talking to you, I’ll call my wife and tell her to put on the water for the pasta because I’m headed home. And when I get there, she’ll have a big hot plate of spaghetti waiting for me.
“We’ll have lunch, I’ll tell her about my day so far, and she’ll tell me about hers,” he said. “And sometimes, when I’m lucky -- and I’m usually lucky -- she’ll have a certain look in her eye. We’ll go into the bedroom, and we’ll make love. Then we’ll take a little nap together. After a while, I’ll get up, take a shower. I’ll get dressed and she’ll have a cup of espresso waiting for me before I go back to work.”
Franco cracked a mischievous smile and asked, “Do you think I care about being competitive?”
The hollow shell
In popular culture, the notion of “La Dolce Vita” has mostly been ironic.
Andrea Sperelli, the protagonist in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1889 novel Il Piacere, is a privileged Abruzzese nobleman in Rome -- obsessed with art, beauty, and indulgence -- who ultimately comes to symbolize the cultural and moral decay of Italian aristocracy.
A generation later, Arnaldo Fraccaroli’s 1912 comedy, La Dolce Vita, told the story of a well-intentioned middle-class buffoon clinging to respectability, unaware of how unremarkable his life was.
Then came Federico Fellini’s 1960 Oscar-winning masterpiece in which Marcello Mastroianni plays gossip columnist Marcello Rubini, a tragic figure drained of purpose as he broods and drifts through the decadent rot of Roman society.
Today, arguments about what La Dolce Vita really means are everywhere --passionate, contradictory, and often commercial.
Was it always meant to be ironic? The social critique of “The Sweet Life” as envisioned by D’Annunzio, Fraccaroli, and Fellini?
Or has it become a myth created to sell the image of Italy to unsuspecting ‘cultural exploiters'?
Is it a state of mind, an ethos of wonder and simple pleasures?
Or just another Instagram hashtag? A slogan to sell beer? Train rides? Cruises? Cars? Jewelry? Clothing?
Whatever it once meant, I think the phrase has drifted so far from its cultural, literary, and satirical origins that it now functions as a kind of secular prayer -- a vague, reflexive aspiration.
The ironies behind D’Annunzio’s decadent aristocrat, Fraccaroli’s deluded striver, and Fellini’s disillusioned journalist have been erased. What’s left is the shell of a myth hollowed out by its own success.
A nice life
It would be easy to dismiss Franco’s marital relationship as I described it as out of touch, a relic of another time. And that’s accurate. I don’t know Franco well, though I can say he was born near the end of World War II, and as such his daily rhythm no doubt reflects the customs of his generation as well as the culture of his country.
But I don’t want any out-of-date traditionalism in the story to obscure a deeper point, which is that it’s not about who boils the water for the pasta, but about the conscious design of a life. The intention, the trade-offs. The refusal to measure success by income or output. That’s what makes me remember the story nearly 20 years later. Not the nap. Not the sex. But the sense of enough1.
That, for me, is the sweet life.
The anecdote about Franco is adapted from a piece I wrote seven years ago for a wonderful but now defunct magazine called Pacific Standard. The original article was a critique of American Exceptionalism, not a discussion of the value of balance in life -- something I and everyone I know struggles with.
The encounter I described was already several years old when I first wrote about it. So, before writing this post, I called a friend in my old neighborhood for an update on Franco.
Sadly, Carmela, his wife, died last year. They’d been married for a few months short of 60 years.
I also learned that Franco “retired” from furniture restoration during the pandemic. The shop is still open, though, run by one of Franco’s nephews. Now in his 80s and still headstrong, Franco still stops by to help. No word on what he does between lunch and coffee.
And another thing:
Italy watchers may have noticed that last week newly installed Pope Leo XIV made his first trip to Castel Gandolfo as pontiff. The gorgeous town, just south of Rome and built along the lip of an extinct volcano, has been the summer residence of the papacy since 1626. But it had been pope-less for more than a decade, since Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, never used it -- to the chagrin of local merchants.
But the big news wasn’t just that the papacy was back but that a team of workers had installed a red clay court for the new tennis-playing pontiff.
It reminded me of a similar story from 1980, when a anonymous paparazzo managed to snap a photo of then-Pope John Paul II in swim trunks, as he lowered himself into the property’s freshly outfitted swimming pool.
That the pope went swimming wasn’t a secret but seeing a grainy photograph of the leader of the world’s then-800 million Catholics shirtless and in shorts raised a few eyebrows at the time.
Now, I want to know who Pope Leo will play tennis with, and -- more importantly -- do they have to let him win?
I’m also hearted by the image of a pontiff who relaxes by swimming laps or hitting a tennis ball across a net. It’s a reminder that even those cloaked in the challenges of sacred responsibility can make time for the simple ingredients of a nice life.
Come back for another dispatch next week.
If you figure out how to do this, please let me know.
It's always difficult from Americans to understand how Mediterranean culture approaches life. Let's forget that afternoon naps are (unfortunately) a thing of the past, I think the main difference in the cultural approach is our religion.
Italians (and Spanish) are Catholic, we were taught that we are all the same in front of God, that it's bad to desire more than others, that personal success mustn't drive our life.
USA have taken the Protestant approach and -more importantly- the Calvinist belief that you always must work as hard as you can, and that you need to deserve your wealth: so, the more you earn, the more you work to prove that you are really earning your money and deserving your success. This approach creates a great deal of wealth, but it implies that people live to work and amass money.
Let's say that the most recent American history proves that such approach can lead to believe that the richest is the most deserving, and it can have serious side effects.
I remember reading this essay before , it stayed with me, one of those pieces that quietly carves a place in your heart.
In a world that runs too fast, be a Franco, gently human, rich in what matters.