Italians know how to do summer right. This photographer discovered their secret

Like many people, Lucy Laucht felt her life shift the first time she went to southern Italy.

The photographer — originally from the UK but by then living in New York — had been to Milan once for work, but in 2016 she had what she calls her “first proper trip”: Capri and the Amalfi Coast.

“I so clearly remember that first experience,” she says. “Landing in Rome, grabbing a shot of espresso, getting the train to Naples.”

From Naples, she hopped on a boat to Capri. Although she was there for work, she had scheduled two days on the island before the shoot started.

“I walked all over Capri in the heat — most people were relaxing on a sunlounger, and I was trying to scramble down rockfaces,” she says.

After the Capri shoot, the team were driven to the Amalfi coast. “Seeing that incredible landscape, I thought there was nowhere else like it,” she says.

On a subsequent solo trip, she headed to Italy’s northern coast to walk the “amazing” footpaths of Cinque Terre. After that, she was sold on Italy.

A love for Italy was already in Laucht’s blood. Her British grandfather had landed in Puglia during World War II. “He was entranced by it,” says Laucht, who has read his diaries of the period, in which he described the port city of Bari, as well as a trip to Rome and meeting the Pope. He also had a photo of Naples — linking his 1940s travels to her seminal visit.

“After everything he’d seen, Italy was a land of brilliant light, so different from the Birmingham suburbs,” she says. “He was an engineer but also an incredible artist, and when he went back to Birmingham, he painted all these frescoes on the walls of his suburban terrace home.”

When the pandemic hit, Laucht — who grew up in the central England city of Birmingham — had just returned to the UK after a decade in New York. The first lockdown gave her time to do some much needed admin. “I had boxes of negatives stashed away, and finally had time to get them processed,” she says. Some of those negatives were of southern Italy, and as people sat in their homes, dreaming of the outside world, they responded to them. She put a few up for sale on her website and they were quickly snapped up. And then came the lightbulb moment: a book.

“The more I looked at them, the more I realized I had a body of work of the ‘spirit of summer’ of southern Italy — what I would later recognize as ‘dolce far niente,’ ” she says now.

Dolce far niente — roughly translated as the sweetness of doing nothing — is exactly what Italian summer vacations are about. In August, Italians head in their droves to the coast, often to hire the same loungers or cabanas they’ve done for years. They’ll eat at the same feet-in-the-sand restaurant, drink at the same bar, and essentially do everything they did last year… and the year before… and the year before that.

That’s the same carefree spirit that Laucht tracked across southern Italy in her new book, “Il Dolce Far Niente,” a collection of photos of seven sizzling destinations: Naples, Ischia, Puglia, the Amalfi Coast and Capri, as well as Sicily and the Aeolian and Egadi island archipelagos which dandle in the sea around it. The images are interspersed with Laucht’s impressions of the destinations. She wrote the book with Lee Marshall, a writer and long-time Umbria resident. “I didn’t want to presume that I knew a place, not being from there, so working with Lee was elemental as he had that expertise,” she says.

It’s a captivating mix. In Naples, she visits the city beach of Santa Lucia, where people crowd onto the sand and splay themselves on boulders, offering themselves to the sun as they overlook the spectacular waters of the Bay of Naples. On the island of Stromboli, she takes to black-sand beaches, a result of the ash clouds that belch out of the volcano — because Stromboli is an active volcano.

On Ischia, an island in the Bay of Naples, she documents the day-to-day life of passeggiate (strolls), diving and fishing which all springs to life on the concrete walkway from the village of Ischia Ponte to its ancient Aragonese castle, perched on a craggy outcrop.

“I’ve always loved observing quietly,” she says. To make the book, she’d “slip away on commercial shoots with an old camera of my dad’s and snap away at those scenes.” She calls her photos “honest” — not the slick images she was creating for her day-to-day work.

Along the Amalfi Coast, she mixes tourist classics like Positano’s Le Sirenuse hotel with beaches adored by locals, while in Sicily, she captures islanders’ picnic lunches for posterity (and even throws in a recipe for stuffed zucchini flowers). In Puglia she visits seafood shacks on the rocky coastline. And on Favignana, one of the Egadi islands, she photographs people sunning themselves in ancient tufa quarries, now spectacular white-sand beaches that look like a modernist art installation.

All the time she’s looking at that special Italian way of spending the summer: lingering over meals, leaping into hot thermal waters, and claiming your own space of sand, pebbles or rock to make your beach. It’s the polar opposite of Americans trying to “do” Europe in their two weeks of vacation.

“Nowhere else has that ease,” says Laucht, who has spent the summers since lockdown traveling to Italy to study the vibe.

Laucht’s photos range from those taken in 2016 — Amalfi, Capri and Ischia — to 2023. And although her work includes more touristy places, from Positano to Capri — and though most of her work for clients is about the snazzier locations — she says it was the places that were less known worldwide that really struck her.

“Ischia holds a special resonance for me — it’s so unlike Capri,” she says.

“There are many real places on the island. The fishing boats come in at 7 a.m. each morning (to the causeway below the castle), and there are old people buying fish. Later in the day young people are showing off, diving into the water — there’s all this life around a concrete jetty. I love the ease that Italians seem to have beside the sea, but also the rawness and grittiness of it. We usually see the polished version of Italy — celebrities on sunloungers at hotels.”

The “raw” city beaches of Naples were another source of fascination for her. “Families were celebrating birthdays and christenings eating spaghetti, and I saw two women arguing, shaking their shoes at each other,” she says. “Someone in the middle was just tuning everything out. That’s what I loved the most — everyone finds their own moment of peace.”

Even the journey itself became part of the experience. From Naples, Laucht was looking at ferry possibilities on Google Maps (“My dad loved train timetables and ferry routes,” she says), before deciding to head to the Aeolians. Laucht took an overnight ferry to Stromboli, sleeping on deck. “I woke up and we were coming in — the sun was rising blood-red over the water, the full moon was behind Stromboli, and (the volcano) was just puffing away,” she says. “I felt like the Aeolians weren’t on the map like some other places.”

She got some beautiful photos, of course, but Laucht — who is now learning Italian — says she also came back with a new idea of how to travel.

“What I observed was this pace of slowness and finding peace amid the chaos, of moving without moving,” she says. “It’s the opposite of seeing as much as possible.”

As a self-declared vacation “box-ticker,” she’s now trying to slow down. “The ultimate luxury for me now is being able to return to a place, to know it, and to know you don’t have to see everything or go to every restaurant. To switch your phone off and watch people go about their day — to be curious — is one of my biggest takeaways.”

“Il Dolce Far Niente” is out now. A collection of prints, alongside works by artist Caroline Popham, who also worked on the book, is on display through the end of September at the 8 Holland Street gallery in London.