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When Lucy Laucht was a child growing up in Birmingham, her grandfather would regale her with fantastic tales of time spent in Bari, Italy as a young man. He never returned to the country, but to memorialise his time there, he adorned the walls of the family home with frescoes of the Bay of Naples.
Now living in Cornwall and working as a professional photographer, Laucht has gone in search of her own Italian stories. Equipped with a film camera that had belonged to her father, she headed south, to Sicily, where she photographed the ripe oranges and peaches stacked in cardboard crates, beachgoers lazing on the white rocks or walking out into the intensely blue sea. From there she travelled up through the Southern rivieras, from the Amalfi Coast to the volcanic Aeolian archipelago and the laid-back lull of the gulf of Naples.
Those photographs have now become a book, Il Dolce Far Niente, which translates to “the sweetness of doing nothing”. Through essays and photographs, she captures the slower pace of an Italian summer: long lunches on a metal table dug into the pebbles of Siciliy’s spiaggia di riposto, drinking espresso looking out over Ischia’s Pontile Aragonese, white and aperol-coloured parasols lined up on the beach in Puglia, a grapefruit pink sunset illuminating the evening waters of Stromboli and a blue-striped linen curtain dancing in the breeze on the Egadi Islands. “What really stayed with me was the repose with which Italians appeared to move through life,” Laucht writes in one essay. “I envy the old signore who sit together shelling peas in peaceful silence, their decades of friendship distilled in a smile, a glance, a series of simple, repeated gestures. I admired those long, unhurried lunches; the locals’ strong connection to family, community and place; their quiet cultivation of ease and joy.”
Recipes are interspersed between the photographs and essays: Sicilian courgette flowers stuffed with herbs, preserved lemons and rice best eaten on the beach, or Neapolitan bucatini allo scarpariello (“in the shoe-maker’s style”), a tomato, garlic and parmesan pasta dish said to be invented by cobblers in the impoverished Quatieri Spagnolo area of Naples. The story goes that the shoemakers accepted cheese as payment for their shoes, and the recipe served to use up their excess of parmesan.
The book also features expressions Laucht picked up along her travels. One of her favourites was movitifermu: to move without moving. “It’s the kind of thing an elderly rural aunt might say to her niece who has come to visit from Palermo and, with her impatient city manners, is itching to get away.”
An extract from Sicily: The Inside Track by Lucy Laucht
When you’re sitting at a bar table in Sicily watching the world go by, nothing works as well to soothe the soul and refresh the body as a glass of latte di mandorla. This literally means “almond milk,” but it’s much sweeter than the almond milk many non-Sicilians will be used to, as it’s generally made from pasta di mandorla, a soft marzipan block that can be bought in the island’s pasticcerie, or pastry shops. Flakes of the marzipan are crumbled into water, bottled, shaken well, and kept in the fridge. Any Sicilian bar that takes itself seriously will make its own. If you see someone reaching for a carton of commercial almond milk, say “No grazie!” and try the place on the other side of the piazza.
Cave di Cusa is the greatest Sicilian archaeological site you’ve never heard of. Back in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, it was the quarry that supplied the limestone blocks and cylindrical column sections for the Greek temple of Selinunte, eight miles to the southwest. When the Carthaginians defeated the Greek army in 409 BC, it was abruptly abandoned, leaving huge blocks in various stages of completion, some already carved and dressed, waiting only to be detached from the mother rock. You can roam freely in a bucolic setting that in spring is covered in bellflowers and great yellow spears of Ferula communis, giant fennel. Almost nobody visits. It’s an Ozymandias kind of place.
If you’ve seen the second season of acerbic TV dramedy series The White Lotus, you’ve seen Villa Tasca, a historic villa that serves as the setting for two female friends’ overnight escape from their male partners. If you haven’t, all the better: this stately Sicilian home is even more impressive in real life. Built in the sixteenth century as a country retreat from city cares, it is surrounded today by the outer suburbs of Palermo. Inside its walls, however, the western Sicilian base of the winemaking Tasca d’Almerita family is still a haven of aristocratic ease. The extensive park is open for a small daily fee, while the lush botanical gardens can be visited on guided tours. But to see the villa’s ornate interior and spend the night in its magnificent bedrooms with their trompe l’oeil frescoes, you’ll need to book the whole pile. Getting married here is one popular reason for doing this. But as the White Lotus episode suggests, not getting married here could be even more fun.
Excerpt taken from Il Dolce Far Niente by Lucy Laucht (£35, Artisan Books). Limited-edition prints from Il Dolce Far Niente will be on view alongside works by artist Caroline Popham from 28 June to September at the Eight Holland Street gallery, St James’s Park Flagship, 34A Queen Anne’s Gate, London
