The Art of the Riposo

A Lesson in Slowing Down

It might be interesting to share how we pulled off living in Italy for part of the year. I will post some steps we took.

We love every minute of it, and what was once a dream is our life!

We started our Italian adventure in Puglia, and though we've since made our way north to Tuscany (read more about that move here: Our Italian Adventure: Leaving Puglia), this particular lesson held true in both places — the riposo is alive and well whether you're in the deep south or the hill towns further north.

As we explore areas in Italy, we discover some gems worth sharing. Some are well-known tourist magnets, and others are lesser-known but always amazing.

Step 1: The art itself

The riposo, siesta, or afternoon nap in southern Italy is neither an obligation nor a recreational activity. It is an art — one that took us, two lifelong overachievers from California, an embarrassingly long time to learn. We came from a culture where lunch is eaten at a desk, over a keyboard, in under twenty minutes. Puglia had other plans for us.

Part of what makes the art possible is architecture. Nearly every window here comes fitted with a tapparella — a rolling shutter that looks and sounds exactly like a garage door, cranked down by hand or a switch on the wall. Pull it shut at one in the afternoon, and a sunlit room goes instantly, completely dark, as if someone flipped a switch on the day itself. It's full-immersion riposo: no eye mask required, no fighting sunlight through the curtains. Italians didn't just adopt a habit of resting at midday — they engineered their houses around it.

Step 2: A little history

Being Californians, we knew the word "siesta" well enough, and on some rare occasion may even have allowed ourselves a short afternoon nap. So when we first encountered the midday shutdown in Italy, we assumed we were looking at the same thing — after all, siesta is a Spanish word, so surely the practice was Spanish too, whether it came from Spain itself or made its way north to California by way of Mexico.

We were half right. The word is Spanish. The practice is much older, and Roman. The Spanish word "siesta" comes from the Latin hora sexta, the sixth hour, counted from dawn. For a Roman who rose with the sun, the sixth hour landed squarely at midday — exactly when the sun was doing its worst. Work stopped. Rich and poor alike retreated indoors to eat, rest, and wait out the heat before the city stirred back to life in the cooler hours of the evening. It was less a luxury than a survival strategy, worked out centuries before anyone had heard of air conditioning.

The habit spread from Rome around the Mediterranean and into Latin America, wherever the sun made working straight through the day a bad idea. Which is to say: long before it had a Spanish name, the midday nap had a Latin one — and Rome got there first.

Step 3: The benefits

None of this would matter much if a nap were just a nap. But numerous studies show that naps can improve mood, physical performance, and mental sharpness — provided you do them correctly. I did not, at first, do them correctly.

When I lived in Rome as a student, I turned the riposo into a research project of my own design: long lunches, a glass of wine (sometimes two), followed by naps that ran well past the hour mark. At the time, it felt like I'd discovered the secret to a good life. In retrospect, I'd discovered an excellent way to ruin a semester. I couldn't sleep at night, I was groggy through what daylight hours I had left, and my studies suffered for it.

It was then that I discovered that the riposo is an art — and that I had been practicing it like an amateur.

I cut the wine from lunch and trimmed the nap to thirty minutes or less. The difference was immediate: I came out sharper, not groggier. It turns out the research backs this up. Naps of ten to twenty minutes are enough to improve performance and lower stress, while anything past thirty minutes risks tipping you into deep sleep — and waking from that brings on sleep inertia, the grogginess that leaves you worse off than if you'd skipped the nap entirely. Set an alarm, and set it for thirty minutes or under.

Again: the riposo is an art. Like most art, it rewards discipline more than indulgence.

Step 4: Closed doors

Mastering your own riposo is one thing. Working around everyone else's is another — and it's the part newcomers to Italy tend to learn the hard way.

A friend spent a few weeks traveling around Italy some years ago, seeing all the beautiful sites. When he got home to Los Angeles, we gathered to hear about the trip. Someone asked, "Did you learn any Italian?" "Yes," he said. "One word." We waited. "Chiuso," he said.

Chiuso means closed. Apparently he'd seen it more than he'd seen the Colosseum.

We didn't understand the joke until we moved here ourselves.

Soon after arriving in Puglia, we decided to drive the forty-five minutes to Otranto to see the famous cathedral floors — a mosaic maze of biblical history laid into the stone. We parked, walked across town, dodged the cafés and tourist shops, and arrived at the cathedral door a little after noon, quite pleased with our timing.

The door was locked.

"What the—?!" I said, or something less printable, staring at a cathedral that had survived Ottoman invasions and eight centuries of history but apparently could not survive lunchtime. We had forgotten the riposo, which in this case had started at noon sharp.

We made the same mistake almost immediately after — with our gym, of all places. Being from California, we assumed a gym meant hours running from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., the way the fitness gods intended. We should have read the hours posted at the front desk more carefully when we joined that first week. One day, needing to run errands in the morning, we strolled over after lunch expecting a treadmill and a shower. We found a locked door instead. Apparently, even the weights need a nap.

Step 5: What we've learned

We've since stopped fighting it.

These days we plan around the riposo the way you'd plan around rush hour — not as an inconvenience, but as a fact of the landscape, one with its own logic once you stop resisting it. There's something genuinely human about it: employees go home, eat lunch, spend an hour with their families, rest, and return to finish the day, rather than grinding through eight or nine hours without a real break.

Many businesses have abandoned the riposo, and I suspect that trend will continue. Still, it would be a pity to lose it entirely. In a world where value gets measured by how much you produce in the shortest possible time, the art of the riposo points to something else — the idea that a day is meant to be paused and savored, not just gotten through.

Insights

Life in Italy — Puglia or Tuscany alike — has many lessons, including the art of the riposo. Rather than seeing the afternoon closing of businesses as an inconvenience, we've come to experience it as a small blessing: a pause built into the day, so you arrive at evening refreshed instead of running on empty.

More next time.

If you have enjoyed reading about our life in Italy, my memoir goes deeper into where it began.

Stories from Puglia: Two Californians in Southern Italy — the memoir of finding our way through the towns, food, and people of the deep south.

"This book elevated my trip. Well written and fun." — Amazon reviewer

https://a.co/d/0340l3Ak