Va Bene.(The Talk of the Town)(The Art of Living Slowly)

"We started as a group of friends with the same problem: difficulty in our personal life to manage our time, being always in a hurry, and being always suspended between past and future." This philosophy--part Deepak Chopra, part Hannah Arendt--was recently proffered by Bruno Contigiani to explain the genesis of L'Arte del Vivere con Lentezza (The Art of Living Slowly), an organization that he founded two years ago, with his wife, Ella.

One recent afternoon, the Contigianis found themselves in Bryant Park, which Bruno rapturously termed "a Zen metropolitan garden." Both had recently received compliments from New Yorkers--Bruno for his pink shirt (at MOMA), and Ella for her rhinestone-studded glasses (at Grand Central). An unhappy and perpetually flustered businessman in Milan, Bruno decided several years ago to consult a life coach; the gambit for happiness worked, and then some--Bruno ended up marrying the coach.

After they found fulfillment for themselves, Bruno and Ella said, they decided to draw more people's attention to the overlooked idea that "time is wealth." Last year, they created a new holiday, the first Global Day of Slow Living. Despite its ambitious name, the event was confined almost entirely to Italy, where the Contigianis orchestrated a number of whimsical events: a reverse bicycle race in Ferrara (where the last rider was declared the winner); an afternoon of grandfathers reading poetry to children in the main square of Follonica; a celebration of the emblematically slow animal, the donkey, near Livorno.

Last August, Bruno and Ella visited New York for seventeen days--"to understand if we could do something like this in this beautiful town," Bruno said. The Contigianis stayed in south Harlem ("It reminded us of a small village in the south of Italy"). They were dazzled by the friendliness and efficiency of the city's bus drivers. "In New York, the typical phrase is 'How can we help you?' " Bruno said, beaming. "And to us that is wonderful."

When they returned to Milan, Bruno wrote an article for an Italian travel magazine titled "A Slowed-Down Life in New York." Taking as his epigraph Holden Caulfield's existential musing on the wintertime fate of Central Park's ducks, Bruno wrote, "Take the time to walk around the central lake, do not run, simply walk. However, ...