Thea Duncan used to peel the fat off her prosciutto. Now she blissfully recalls the first time she tried lardo.
Cassandra Santoro once subsisted on juice cleanses and quinoa. These days, she starts every morning with a cornetto.
And a few years ago, Skyler Mapes and Linda Sarris rarely ate pasta out of concern that it would make them feel heavy. Ask them today, and they’ve probably eaten pasta three times this week.
All of these women are Americans who now spend most or all of the year living in Italy. Each of them have noticed a positive shift in their body image, and the way they think about food, health, and their bodies in general, since they adapted to an Italian lifestyle.
While working in New York City in her 20s, Santoro, now 37, struggled with disordered eating. Colleagues pursed lips at what she ate for lunch, Facebook ads heckled her to hire a nutritionist, and she endlessly cycled through juice cleanses, twice-a-day workouts, and bingeing on M&Ms in her bedroom.
Then she founded Travel Italian Style. Perched for half of the year on the Amalfi Coast, she quickly embraced the region’s rhythms of eating: A chocolate-filled pastry for breakfast, then a walk back up a hill to her flat. A larger lunch of pasta while scouting restaurants for clients, then more movement. At dinner, a single aperitif to stoke her appetite, then something small to satisfy it. It’s “strategic,” she calls it, this Italian way of lightening your meals as the day goes on, but not “obsessive.”
When she is back in New York, Santoro misses hearing the stories behind the hyperlocal foods she enjoys in Campania, where her landlord takes her to eat granita made with friends’ lemons, and her pasta al pomodoro is prepared with tomatoes picked by the restaurant owner, his farm a 20-minute drive up the mountain. She’s learned to see food not for how guilty it will make her feel, but for who grew it, how they cooked it, and why.
“When you start to understand what’s special to the specific area, you understand what’s in season, that’s when you start to change,” she says. “I just feel more inspired to eat better, to support the local people and keep learning.”
Duncan, 38, lives in Milan with her husband and their son. Nothing is off limits in their family diet, but everything is of high quality. Three-year-old Lorenzo happily eats both pizza and gelato but also branzino and fava beans.
“In the States, people are like, ‘Pizza is unhealthy.’ No, it’s flour, tomato sauce, and maybe a delicious piece of mozzarella cheese, so why is that bad? It’s not bad,” says Duncan, who developed the Move to Italy Masterclass and posts on Instagram as @doingitaly. “We’re really careful about how we source our tomatoes, and we know the producers who make our mozzarella. There’s no concern.”
Duncan says her friends never eat lunch at their desks, and her husband refuses to walk while eating gelato. The way you tend to give food your undivided attention in Italy, she suggests, makes you feel more connected to what’s on your plate and less likely to overeat.
“Food is love here, food is passion, food is culture. Food isn’t just about sustenance, and it certainly isn’t about shoving something in my mouth so I can go on to the next thing,” Duncan says.
Mapes, who founded EXAU Olive Oil with her husband, says that she doesn’t hear food being discussed as a reward or punishment for exercise in Italy like it sometimes is back home. People don’t make self-deprecating jokes about going to the gym after eating carbonara, for example; savoring the guanciale and then enjoying a passeggiata after dinner is just fine.
“I feel like there’s a lot of casual toxicity about food in the U.S., like, ‘You’re eating again? You’re hungry again?’ That’s not something you hear in Italy, at least not in our family,” Mapes, 28, says. “My anxiety level has gone down so much because I’m not thinking constantly about how many calories I’m consuming, or, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t work out today.’ I can just eat in peace.”
Still, sexism and exclusionary beauty standards exist in Italy, and women are not immune to criticism about their appearance.
“People talk about my body to me all day long: I go out into the market and they tell me if they think I’m fat or skinny today,” says Sarris, 37, a chef and culinary tour guide in Palermo who posts on Instagram as @thecheekychef. “People just evaluate my body — mostly men but women, too — and tell me what they think about it, totally unwarranted.
“That’s a really weird thing for me; they have this mentality of ‘Mangia, mangia,’ they want you to eat everything, pasta is fine, but then if you gain a few pounds, they call you out on it. It’s like a Weight Watchers program that I didn’t sign up for.”
At the same time, Sarris says, she feels that her body type is more “celebrated” in Italy than it is in the States. She’s less self-conscious in Sicily because it’s where she feels her healthiest: She walks or bikes everywhere she goes, she eats fresh foods according to the seasons, and no one has an “anti-carbohydrate agenda.”
“I would definitely say I feel more beautiful here,” she says.
Living in Italy won’t transform your relationship with food overnight, Santoro says. It’s also not the only place where you can cultivate, over time, eating and exercise habits that are good for both your body and your spirit. The route to better body image is a lifelong journey wherever you are.
Italian culture just might, however, teach you to eat curiously, attentively, and in the pursuit of pleasure, which can make all the difference in the way you see yourself.
“It’s crazy, eating a lot of citrus when I’m here — the lemons, the oranges, the sunshine — I typically feel like I’m glowing,” Santoro says. “I feel better about my body, and I’ve been more accepting and appreciating of all the curves and things that make me unique.”