There is a small Greek island in the Aegean where men routinely live into their nineties and beyond, where heart disease and dementia are strikingly rare, and where a surprising number of people simply seem to forget to die. The island is Ikaria, and it is one of the world’s handful of Blue Zones, the …
You have finished a wonderful dinner in Rome, the plates are long cleared, and now you are ready to pay and go. So you wait for the check. And you wait. The waiter drifts past, unhurried, attending to other tables, and the bill simply never appears, until you begin to feel invisible, wondering if you …
Watch an Italian man of eighty-five move through his day in a village in the hills, and you see something that has largely vanished from American life, a man still fully woven into the daily fabric of his world, walking everywhere, tending his garden, sitting in the piazza with his lifelong friends, eating with his …
A lot of people talk about brain health after 70 as if the whole answer lives in supplements, crossword puzzles, and whatever expensive powder is currently pretending to be neuroscience. The more useful answer is usually much duller. Eat breakfast. Eat it regularly. Do not turn the first meal of the day into either a …
The American steps into the spa at a Portuguese hotel or a Lisbon wellness center expecting the familiar routine, the swimsuit, the modest American spa etiquette, the quiet separateness, and encounters instead a set of customs that gives them pause, the different relationship to the body, the rules about what to wear and not wear, …
The rude move is not smiling too little or failing some secret phrase test. It is much simpler than that. In much of Europe, the checkout is treated as a fast shared zone, and a lot of Americans still treat it like a private packing station. A lot of Americans do this without even noticing. …
There is one meal in Europe that time itself bends around. Across the continent, Sunday lunch is not merely a meal but an institution, a long, slow, sacred gathering of the family around the table in the early afternoon, and it holds a place in European life that Americans, with their looser and more scattered …
Here is a genuinely quiet miracle hiding in plain sight on dinner tables right across Europe: almost every country on the continent has a potato dish it treats as its own, a national treasure, a taste of home, and yet the potato is not even European. It arrived from the Americas only a few centuries …
On Tuesday mornings, Susan does the Mercado Central run: two kinds of tomatoes, a bag of clementines, whatever fish the woman at stall 87 says is good, and a coffee standing up on the way out, all of it for less than the parking would have cost at her old supermarket in Ohio. Susan is …
Suggest to a typical American that they might rent, rather than own, a home in retirement, and you will usually get a horrified look, followed by the familiar catechism: renting is throwing money away, you have to build equity, you do not want to be paying a landlord at seventy. It is one of the …
Autumn does not arrive the same way everywhere in Europe, and neither, it turns out, does the food that greets it. As the light shortens and the first cold evenings settle in, kitchens across the continent turn toward warmth, but what warmth means depends entirely on where you are standing. It tastes of olive oil …
For decades, the topless sunbather was one of the enduring images of the French Riviera, a symbol of a certain Gallic ease with the body that the more buttoned-up world found by turns scandalous and enviable. That image is fading fast. Survey after survey confirms that far fewer French women go topless on the beach …