I have visited Italy more than once, moving between Rome, Verona, Florence, Venice, Milan, and other cities. In addition to that, I have read a great deal about its history and culture. Among the most delightful things I have encountered about Italians was what appeared in the film starring Julia Roberts, Eat Pray Love, based on an American novel of the same name by author Elizabeth Gilbert. The story follows a woman through a failed marriage and the ordeal of divorce, which drives her to leave her country and travel between Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of meaning, pleasure, and love. She discovers the joy of food in Rome, the revelations of the soul in Indian temples, and finds love on an Indonesian island.
In this novel, the author describes her passion for learning the Italian language and her desire to travel there, despite her friends' opposition and their astonishment at her intention to learn a new language at that age. Yet none of that stopped her from pressing ahead with her plan, having decided that her desire to learn this language — which she described as resembling the language of birds — was reason enough, without her having to offer any explanations or justifications.
The woman travels to Rome and faces the challenges of adapting to Italian life, with all its noise and celebration of living, yet ultimately succeeds in finding the key that grants her entry into the city through its most intimate of doors: life the Italian way.
She discovers the secret of life through a sentence spoken to her by an elderly Italian barber, when he tells her: "Laugh out loud and move your hands like the Italians, and live life with pleasure without asking yourself why. We are very different from you Americans — we work, we make friends, we love, so that we may enjoy life. You, on the other hand, work all week long only to sit in front of the television at the end of it, eating hamburgers and watching American football."
Italians have an entirely different philosophy in the way they engage with life, time, food, family, friends, and beauty. Yes, they are not perfect; they are not as organised as the Germans, nor as punctual as the Swiss, nor as shrewd and calculating as the English — but they possess a sweet philosophy whose essence is: spending time doing nothing.