by Clara Nanut @gour.mode

Once upon a time, it was wise to leave the chaos of the Urbe for the ville d’otium, earthly paradises nestled along the lush Gulf of Naples: villas where lavish banquets, boat outings, strolls in the countryside, thermal baths and healthy reading flowed slowly through the calendar, in a seamless stream of days.

Ancient Rome became a fairy tale, in which entrepreneurs and senators left behind the stressful negotia of the Eternal City and reached these finely decorated palaces to devote themselves to otium, the rest from public activity, the leisure time devoted to private life and studies.

An activity reserved for the élite, it is defined in Seneca’s De Otium as necessary to regain physical and mental balance. A time of introspection, deep reflection, inner growth, self-improvement.

So, in the torrid August sun scorching the Capital, we suddenly see a Vespa scooting by. It’s Nanni Moretti in Caro Diario: a wandering traveler journeying from the deserted city to the Aeolian Islands in the vain hope that isolation will heal him even for a moment from the daily racket and idiosyncrasies of existence.

And if Nanni teaches us that the quest for this ecstatic state is timeless, and the ancient Latins that Roman otium is the predecessor of the notorious “villeggiatura”, what are its origins? Who first pursued it?

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Villeggiatura

noun, f. [derived from verb “villeggiare”]. – Vacationing, spending a leisure or rest period, in the country, by the sea or in the mountains. By extension, the period of time and the very place where one goes or is vacationing.

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Villeggiatura is therefore, by metonymy, the place where one spends their vacation, most notably at a villa di delizia, a villa of delights. The term villeggiatura originated in Venice during the Renaissance to define residing at country villas in the warm season. At that time, aristocrats from cities such as Rome, Florence, or Venice would move each year to their summer residences, which were sometimes veritable palaces: one example is the famous Palladian villas.

Renaissance villeggianti would go to their country residences to supervise labor on their agricultural estates and at the same time enjoy a period of rest immersed in nature. These were usually short stays that combined leisure and business.

There came later times when the period of leisure became longer, eventually reaching the duration of several months, and the stay was devoted not to supervising the estates but to pure enjoyment.

These times are described for us by an exceptional chronicler: Carlo Goldoni.

“Where shall you vacation this year?” is the recurring question in the plays of this great Venetian writer, whose many comedies sketched a detailed portrait of Italian society in the mid-18th century.

In the 1700s, vacations became a fashion, a sign of social distinction. It was not an itinerant trip, but a change of residence for an entire season or longer. Similarly to our Italian parents or grandparents in the 1960s, who would cram themselves into their Fiat 500 and fly on the Autostrada del Sole towards their holiday destination, at the time vacationing required even greater endless preparations: trays, candelabra, coffee, spices, chocolate, bonnets, lacy shawls, and fashionable clothes, all stored in large trunks ready to be loaded in a carriage or on the burchiello, a boat that followed a river itinerary along the Brenta.

The riverbanks were encrusted with architectural masterpieces, where balls, luncheons and card games were hosted. This is how “the innocent fun of the countryside has become in our day a passion, a delirium, a frenzy,” our chronicler reveals.

Before leaping from lavish balls in the villas along the Brenta to the nights at King’s in Porto Ercole, with politicians and celebrities singing along to an Ornella Vanoni tune, perhaps this historical excursus is missing a few pieces: in particular, the vacationing trends between the 1800s and 1900s. If from the Renaissance to the 1700s the ancient practice of villeggiatura persisted and thus privileged a close and steady destination, the 19th century becomes the golden age of tourism, a term coined by the colonialist British and certified by the shift from family villas to the Grand Hotel.

The Orient Express, the Venice Lido, the Titanic, the Victoria, the Bristol, the Imperial and the Angleterre…

A vacation aboard luxurious trains and ships to remote destinations, compelled by a fascination with the East, seeking the most varied and vital exotic charms.

An élite tourism that resembles that of modern day: although the Grand Tour could last from a few months up to years, the similarity lies in the itinerary, the travelling, the crossing of borders, the frenzy in different proportions, the thirst for discovering new places and foreign tastes and fashions.

Instead, there is something else which characterizes our villeggiatura, which links the kisses on the beach of Forte dei Marmi in the lyrics of Sapore di Mare to the Ancient Roman otium, which connects Goldoni’s noble villeggiante departing on a carriage laden with trunks and Dino Risi’s iconic Lancia in Il Sorpasso, cruising on the Via Aurelia and loaded with the euphoria and wishful thinking of all Italian families on the way to their holiday destination.

That something is the slow pace, the stability, the peace, the ability to remain idle, the repetition of gestures and traditions that do not fear the passage of time and turn the week in a blur of days.

From the 1950s, just like the Roman otium, villeggiatura becomes a necessity, or rather a right, and in the Italy of expansion, prosperity and economic miracle, villeggiatura becomes democratic.

The exodus from the city, a fascinating ghostly realm reigned by those who remain there, the departure in June and the return in September, the reunion with seasonal friends, the beloved bathing establishments, the Vespa rides, the white nights, the summertime sweethearts, the salt in your hair and the guitar strings vibrating at sunset. And then there’s the mountains, the walks in the wilderness, the deep breaths of clean air, the rich Tyrolean breakfasts, the chamois shorts and edelweiss socks…

Under the beach umbrella or sometimes up on high in the mountains, a green-white-red amarcord (I remember, oh! how I remember) germinated inside all Italians today – possibly all children of young love stories burning on the seashore to the rhythm of fleeting kisses, sweetened by the end-of-summer promise of corresponding once back from vacation, not always kept.

Our fleeting expeditions to Timbuktu convince us that we can think different thoughts, they fill our eyes with foreign wonders, and spare us the heartbreaking melancholy of return, but what do they really leave us with?

The villeggiatura of our childhood is now a promised land, an earthly paradise, a forbidden dream – but can we ever really relive it?

Perhaps we can, by learning to give ourselves time to escape, to retreat into ourselves, by understanding that the value of each instant is always more important than any happy ending.

“And at midnight I’ll turn into a pumpkin and drive away in my glass slipper,” says Audrey Hepburn to Gregory Peck in Roman Holidays.

And he replies: “And that’ll be the end of the fairytale.”

Villeggiatura tints summer with eternity and transience.

The key is knowing how to love it.