Open Instagram and you’ll find an Italy of laundry drying in the sun, fields swaying in the breeze, elderly men playing cards in village squares, cicadas singing through the afternoon, and endless sunsets over the sea. This is the so-called “slow-life”—millions of views built around the idea of an authentic, simple country untouched by time. A form of slowness that is no longer lived so much as consumed.
Thirty years ago, however, slowness meant something very different. In the late 1980s, Rome was welcoming Italy’s first McDonald’s, while a small association founded among the hills of the Langhe, then known as ArciGola, was pushing back against the standardization of taste and food culture. That protest would eventually become Slow Food, a movement that gave birth to the Presidia project, the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, and an entirely different way of thinking about food, place, and time.
Then came social media and hyper-tourism. Slowness remained, but its function changed. What had once been a cultural practice became an aesthetic. What had begun as a critique of consumer culture turned into content to be consumed.
Today, it only takes a few seconds of scrolling through travel accounts to realize there’s a familiar script at work. Italy is reduced to a recurring visual vocabulary: washing fluttering in the breeze, grandmothers making fresh pasta by hand, fishermen mending their nets, silent alleyways, and sunsets in Puglia. Many of these videos are made by foreign visitors, but nationality isn’t really the point. The point is the gaze.
Borrowing the concept of the male gaze from feminist criticism, I’d suggest the existence of a tourist gaze: the way travelers construct a place in their own image, selecting only what confirms the idea they already had before arriving. We all do it, to be fair: we go to Paris looking for cafés, to New York for skyscrapers, to Japan for temples. But the rhetoric of the slow life has pushed this tendency to an extreme.
Authenticity, after all, is not an intrinsic quality of places. It is a category constructed by those who look at them. A country is not “authentic” in itself; it becomes authentic when it confirms the image the visitor hoped to find.
Italy, in particular, is increasingly portrayed as a country suspended in time: an eternal countryside populated by wise old men, empty piazzas, and ancient rhythms. It’s a comforting narrative, but an inevitably partial one. Outside the frame remain depopulation, low wages, inadequate public transport, precarious work, and the everyday realities of those who actually live in these places all year round.
The privilege lies precisely in being able to choose what to see. To turn a complex territory into an emotional backdrop where authenticity can be experienced without engaging with the material conditions that make it possible. Social media algorithms reward images that are simple, comforting, and instantly recognizable. And so Italy itself becomes another aesthetic product, packaged for sharing.
And yet, there is nothing particularly new about this under the Italian sun. Ours may be a country full of contradictions and peculiarities, but it has seen centuries of travelers projecting their fantasies onto its landscapes.
Since the days of the Grand Tour, the Mediterranean has been imagined as a timeless Arcadia. From Goethe and the English watercolorists to American writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Marble Faun (a novel I recently discovered and loved), generations of travelers have projected onto Italy the fantasy of a classical, almost primitive Eden, often choosing not to see poverty, conflict, and social contradictions. Hawthorne’s novel is, of course, far more nuanced than that, but the fantasy itself runs deep through the Western imagination.
The difference today is that this Arcadia no longer fills travel journals or Romantic canvases. It fills Instagram feeds, TikTok videos, and tourism marketing campaigns.
Perhaps Slow Food was right after all: slowing down can still be an act of resistance. But only as long as slowness doesn’t become just another piece of content to scroll past with your thumb.
