Italy Is Inconvenient And That’s Okay
Two weeks of eating like a pig in Italy. Eight pounds lost. All thanks to inconvenience.
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I was recently in the lobby of the Hilton Rome Airport, waiting to check in. An American tourist approached the bellhop and asked him where to catch a taxi.
“Where are you headed?” he asked the tourist. The man mentioned a place nearby. “Oh, that’s only ten minutes on foot. You don’t need a taxi for that,” the bellhop replied.
The American, taken aback, insisted, “Well, yeah, it’s ten minutes away, so I’d like a taxi.”
The bellhop stared at what looked like a perfectly fit young man with a mixture of amazement and disgust.
I didn’t laugh at their cultural clash. Twenty years ago, when I moved from Italy to Canada, I would have been on the bellhop side of that conversation, puzzled by a culture that spared me every possible step.
North American life is convenient
Currently, that clash is trending on TikTok. The 2026 World Cup has a new generation of Europeans discovering the real America, beyond what they read in the headlines. What they are finding, with the same childlike wonder I once had, is America’s incredible convenience.
Because middle-class life in North America is, frankly, astonishing. We live lives that are more comfortable than those of kings just two centuries ago, and we’re so used to it that we don’t even recognize it anymore.
The stores are larger than piazze and stocked as if rebuilding civilization depended on them. Portion sizes are huge, and the variety is simply unthinkable in Europe (except for the pasta aisle).
I’m reminded of Boris Yeltsin, who wandered into a random Texas supermarket in 1989 and was so staggered by the abundance he witnessed that it quietly broke his faith in the Soviet system. He even, for a moment, questioned whether the grocery store was set up that way specifically to impress him.
The cars are giant and automatic. The gas is cheap compared to Europe, and the roads are wide and easy to navigate. So Americans drive everywhere.
There’s a drive-through for everything, even in small towns. In most cities in Italy, there’s essentially one: McDonald’s. The word “drive-through” doesn’t exist because it all comes down to one of them, so they just call it the McDrive. A friend of mine recently said to me, “Non penso che il Burger King locale abbia il McDrive.” (I don’t think that the local Burger King has the McDrive. He meant the drive-through, of course.)
In North America, we use dryers to make wet clothes dry in just an hour, whenever we feel like it. And if we get bored with our own food, we can easily try something new since we’ve imported dozens of cuisines from all over the world.
In a small Italian town, your options are Italian, a kebab shop where you’ll be greeted with “sciao belo,” (the sweetest sound when you’re hungry), and a Chinese-run all-you-can-eat sushi place. That’s essentially it.
Italy would never, but here you can order dessert in a cup and call it coffee. At 4 pm, if you’d like.
Life in North America is stressful and expensive, but it’s also gloriously abundant and convenient.
Convenient doesn’t mean better
Here’s the thing. Convenience is friction removed, but a lot of that friction is useful work.
Take walking. The everyday walks an Italian takes to many third places are exercise they never need to schedule, and it’s rarely skipped.
In North America, we engineered it out of our existence and then bought treadmills to put it back. Or joined gyms we drive to, only to park as close as possible to the entrance.
I have some anecdotal evidence. This past May, I spent two weeks in central Italy. I ate like a pig when I really shouldn’t have. Pasta, pizza, porchetta, pasticcini and cornetti (plural) at breakfast, you name it. I came home bracing for the weigh-in, ready for the worst. Surprise! Down eight pounds. Mostly water, I know, but not gaining an ounce after eating like that is the real tell.
I credit fourteen days of 10,000+ steps, mostly through narrow hilly streets. And higher quality food. My body did the arithmetic I had refused to do for years.
The walks don’t just help your body and your mind. They aid the soul as well. Because as you do the same passeggiata every evening, you’ll meet the same faces. Soon enough, they stop being strangers, and they become nods, then names, and in some cases even friends. Remove the piazza, the corner bar, and the places you reach on foot, and you eradicate key social infrastructure.
North America is lonelier than it should be, and part of the reason is simple: we drive past everybody.
And then there is the food. The hyper-palatable, highly processed stuff that’s so convenient to grab is so tempting because it’s engineered to override the signals that tell us to stop eating. They are not poison in a dramatic sense. They just work on us a little better than they should.
I’ll make one exception: air conditioning. Colpo d’aria (the fear that a draft makes you sick) be damned, that artificial breeze is a gift straight from God. Europe is simply wrong on this one.
So yes, Italy is inconvenient. You’ll walk when you’d rather ride, pray for sunshine to dry your clothes, sweat in buildings without air conditioning, and be forced to dine out late because no reputable restaurant will serve you dinner at 6 pm. The inconvenience is real.
But this type of inconvenience is an honest bill paid up front. North America takes a different approach. It mails you the charges later, with interest, to your knees, your blood pressure, and eventually the realization that most people on your street don’t know your name.
I’ve lived both lives, and I believe the inconvenience is the better deal. Not objectively, and not for everyone. But for most people, paying in steps is the better choice.
I’ve seen the consequences of convenience on my weight and my health. Yet, here I am, still on the convenient hemisphere of the world. So I’m not here sanctimoniously telling you to choose Italy’s inconvenience.
Because here is the trouble with convenience: it’s awfully convenient. It’s an addiction, and like all addictions, one that’s hard to give up.
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Retirement from that cushy U.S. lifestyle, and moving abroad to a walkable city, ditching the cars, walking everywhere, becoming quite self-sufficient on the excellent public transportation everywhere else, and adopting a balanced, self-care lifestyle, has been not only fun, and a good way to meet like-minded people, but also a good class in traveling economically and staying fit at the same time.
LOVE this piece! Totally agree. And re walking: I’m a regular walker and I’m slender. But on my last visit to Italy, I was alone during the day and walked EVERYWHERE (to my delight). I ate the most beautiful meals of my life - every afternoon and evening - and came home 4-5 lbs lighter. Meanwhile, my daughter returned after a year and suffered such stomach ailments in America that no doc could pinpoint the problem - until one asked more questions and simply said, “It’s our food. You’ve eaten purely for a year and your stomach is rejecting all the chemicals and fillers we use. It’s disturbing.”