Growing up on a hobby farm in rural Australia, far from the frightening world where children gyrate to TikTok routines and seek validation through selfies, we were often bored out of our brains. My mother was staunchly devoted to the Montessori ideal that children need boredom to ignite their creativity. While we did often spend hours with our eyeballs plastered to the Nintendo 64, my childhood is punctured by memories of arts and crafts; like the time mum smashed chipped mugs with a hammer to make mosaics for the garden; or the absurdly choreographed dance shows I created with my sisters and brother for my parents; or even that regular newspaper column I typed and slipped under their bedroom doors with gossip articles about people at school. We read, we wandered through the paddocks, we created.
Stumbling blindly through adulthood in Australia, I lost that canvas in my mind: Between one savings goal and the next; grading English essays into the AM; shutting out the hamster-wheel of anxiety with Netflix; I lost it. I no longer had the time to be bored. I no longer had the batteries to do anything other than deepen my sense of dissatisfaction by comparing my world to others’.
Vaulting away from the drudgery of this narrative, I now find myself heading home from Trentino to Rome, where I have been living for the past three years. The romanticised notions of Italy aside, the joy I have found in recent times has not only been from work, but the satisfaction of pleasurable pursuits that I has discarded amid my daily grind back home: I sporadically write poetry, relish discovering vintage book stores, devour novels, and my curiosity about living is back. Simply having more free time has led me to this spike in joie de vivre. To clunkily meld two foreign expressions into one sentence, my joie de vivre has come from finding my own sense of dolce vita. And no, I do not mean purchasing a dilapidated Tuscan villa and finding some swooning Italian. Been there – well, the latter.
If I can give my spin on the overused term “la dolce vita” (which often makes my want to spit my cappuccino when it enters my ears) , it it is not just a life full of mundane events, beauty and pleasure; I mean, to be fair, that is an accurate summation of my life: work and imbibing the sites of the city. Yet it is more than that: it is prioritising work less and living more. Not having your entire day filled by a to-do list means you need to find ways to pass that time. You have this blank section of your canvas that you can fill.
Beyond having more time, I find Rome to be one of the most fulfilling relationships I have ever had. It feels like my imagination has forever been kidnapped and I am in some bizarre Stockholm Syndrome love affair with my captor; she is like this elderly lady with hundreds of cats who feeds me copious amounts of pasta. I relish in my spare moments getting to know her better, discovering her blemishes and gazing at her timeless beauty. The more time passes, the more I want to be in her life.
Un bacio x
Skye
The Adopted Italian 