Italy Stays With You
By Stefano Paolinelli
People often say they love Italy, but what they usually mean is that they loved a trip.
What’s harder to explain is why Italy doesn’t leave you when you go home.
You can drive on roads built during the Roman Empire and stay in bed-and-breakfasts that date back to medieval times. You can eat food that exists nowhere else on earth, traditions so deeply rooted that they are recognized by UNESCO. The countryside opens into green paradises, with villages that look like Christmas nativities, magically clinging to hillsides and cliffs.
But it’s not just the art, the food, or the landscapes, though all of those matter, it’s something smaller and harder to name. Italy has a way of slipping into your daily thinking. You start remembering the smell of bread early in the morning, the sound of cups clinking at a bar, the way strangers greet one another without needing a reason.
In Italy, life happens out in the open. People don’t rush past one another as much. They pause. They talk. They notice who’s there.
That’s one of the first oddities you encounter: time moves differently. Not slower exactly, just with less anxiety. Lunch is not something to get through. Coffee is not fuel. A meal, even a simple one, is a moment where everyone silently agrees to stop and be present.
Italy is full of small towns where nothing “special” seems to be happening, and yet everything feels meaningful. Someone sweeping the sidewalk in front of their shop. An elderly man sitting on a bench, watching the afternoon pass. Neighbors calling out to one another from balconies. These scenes aren’t staged. They’re not nostalgic. They’re just daily life, uninterrupted.
Having lived in the United States for over thirty years, my experience returning to Italy — no longer just as a tourist, but as an Italian coming home, made something very clear to me: the value placed on family and friendship runs deeper here than almost anywhere else. There is always a place to stay, whether at someone’s home or through friends of friends. People pick you up at the train station, lend you their car, drive you wherever you need to go. You are never truly stranded. Relationships come first. People come first. That is life’s real priority.
There are frustrations, of course. Rules that seem flexible. Systems that don’t always work the way you expect. But over time, you begin to realize that what looks like inefficiency is often a choice, a conscious or unconscious decision to put people ahead of procedures, to leave room for conversation, improvisation, and human judgment.
Italy doesn’t pretend to be perfect. In fact, Italians are often the first to complain about it. And yet they stay. Or if they leave, they talk about returning. Because beneath the disorder, there is a deep intelligence to how life is arranged, one that values beauty, relationships, and continuity over speed.
What makes Italy stand out isn’t that it has everything. It’s that it refuses to give up certain things: local identity, regional pride, the importance of where food comes from, the belief that daily life should still have texture and warmth.
You feel it in the way towns smell different from one another. In the way bread tastes different from village to village. In the way wine changes not just by region, but by hill, by exposure, by year. Italy insists that place still matters.
And maybe that’s why it lingers. Because in a world that’s becoming more uniform, Italy remains stubbornly specific. It asks you to slow down, to pay attention, to accept imperfections in exchange for something real.
You don’t leave Italy thinking it’s flawless.
You leave thinking it’s alive.
And once you’ve felt that, the rhythm of ordinary days lived with care, it’s hard to believe there’s a better place to be human.
Stefano Paolinelli