Harry Styles Responds To Life In Italy Backlash<\/p>\n
For reference, aside from a few, sometimes bizarre, sightings \u2014 like in the crowd for the election of<\/a> the new pope at the Vatican, and running various marathons<\/a> \u2014 32-year-old Harry has been enjoying a quiet life away from the spotlight since his world tour came to an end in July 2023.<\/p>\n But now, he is gearing up for the release of his long-awaited fourth studio album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, and while working the promo circuit, he reflected on the slower pace of life that he enjoyed after relocating to Italy in his break.<\/p>\n In a profile for the Sunday Times<\/a>, it was revealed that shortly after his 30th birthday in 2024, Harry lived in a rented house just outside of Rome with his friend Alessandro Michele, the former creative director at Gucci. The star recalled: \u201cIt was a big, important, transitional moment for me \u2014 to stop working and be settled somewhere for a while. I was settling into that life and a new space. I was aware of how pivotal that time in my life was going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n Later in the interview, Harry was asked what he had been up to for the past two and a half years, and he said: \u201cAt the end of the tour, the idea of taking time out felt insane. I didn\u2019t know if I could do it. But it was the right time for me \u2014 we\u2019d finished the tour in July and I was turning 30 in February. It was time for me to stop for a bit and pay some attention to other parts of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cItaly has become really special to me over the past few years,\u201d Harry then added. \u201cI drove from London to Rome during Covid, in that time when you could travel. I\u2019d spent all my years before that touring \u2014 with little gaps in between \u2014 and if I had a week off, I\u2019d never have driven somewhere, I would have got there and back as fast as possible. Presented with this time, I drove there \u2014 and I thought: \u2018I\u2019m going to enjoy doing this.\u2019 When I was in Rome, the city just taught me how to slow down.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cItaly became so important to me because I was so used to everything moving so quickly and being on the go, but then I remember going to a caf\u00e9 and sitting and having a coffee and thinking: \u2018I don\u2019t remember the last time I sat down and had a coffee \u2014 if I\u2019ve ever sat down and just had a coffee,\u2019\u201d he went on. \u201cI was suddenly learning, through my friends, that eating a meal is more than just sitting down and refuelling. I realized the pleasure in just being in the moment of what you\u2019re doing. The Romans are the best at that \u2014 that\u2019s their speciality. The pace they\u2019ve taught me has been so special.\u201d<\/p>\n And this is the part of Harry\u2019s interview that many took issue with, with social media users calling out his claim that a slow lifestyle is the \u201cspeciality\u201d of people who live in Rome, as well as his apparent lack of awareness of the wealth and privilege that actually afforded him this lifestyle. To give you a vibe of the general conversation, one viral tweet<\/a>, which has been liked more than 137,000 times, says in response to Harry\u2019s comment: \u201cthe privilege to call italian life \u2018slow\u2019 is so ironic. you are privileged to sit down and sip your coffee in comfort somewhere in italy because you are a wealthy man, not because you’re in italy. dumbass.\u201d<\/p>\n Italian people also weighed in, with a popular tweet<\/a> translating to English as: \u201cMeanwhile, this says that the Romans are laid-back and in Rome he discovered slow living. ROME. Slow living. The rich truly live in a parallel reality.\u201d<\/p>\n Harry did not publicly comment on the backlash at the time, but fans think that he subtly acknowledged the response in his recent interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music<\/a>, which was released on Wednesday. It was actually Zane who brought it up, telling Harry: \u201cWhen you went to Italy, it wasn\u2019t a surprise to me because we\u2019d spoken about it\u2026 What is it about Rome? What was it about that place that drew you back?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just a place that, for me, I was able to slow down for the first time,\u201d Harry replied. \u201cSitting down to have a coffee. It doesn\u2019t mean I was sitting down to have a coffee all day. I was doing other things also.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, it wasn’t about the coffee,\u201d he went on. \u201cIt wasn’t about the thing. It was about the appreciation that is in the way of life there. Of how special they treat food, how special they treat their relationships with each other, how special they treat time that is spent together.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUltimately, I think it comes back to appreciating the love around you and the time you have,\u201d Harry concluded. \u201cIt was, for me, just the right time to\u2026 I think I knew that if I keep just going, and I stop this tour, and I just make another record, and then I go tour that, I’m going to do it this way for the rest of my life without ever taking a moment to check in with myself about, like: \u2018Am I even processing how special this is?\u2019 Because you can’t miss something if you don’t go anywhere. You have to give some space to allow for something to show up as special again.\u201d<\/p>\n Reacting to this part of the interview, one person tweeted<\/a>: \u201cthe fact that harry kept emphasizing \u2018FOR ME\u2019 about being able to take it in slow in italy and that he wasn\u2019t sitting and drinking coffee alllll day lmaoo he def saw that tweet.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201charry talking about the sitting down and having coffee controversy HELP IM CRYING HES ON TWITTER,\u201d somebody else wrote<\/a>, while another added<\/a>: \u201cnot harry addressing the hate he got when talking about sitting down and having a coffee in italy that is FRYING ME.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Harry Styles Responds To Life In Italy Backlash For reference, aside from a few, sometimes bizarre, sightings \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136,7111,20013],"class_list":["post-521155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-timely","tag-uk-celeb-team"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}