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EAT DRINK AND GO SLOW

Eat, Drink, And Go Slow
Between red terracotta roofs just outside the northern Italian town of Bra, there rises a church tower with a clock that is a half hour slow. In Bra, that's close enough to be right on time. Though not far from the bustle and industrial stench of Turin, Bra smells of lilacs, and leisure is the law. It is both the home of an international movementthat promotes "slow food" (the opposite of American fast food) and one of 31 Italian municipalities that have joined a sister cause, the "slow cities." By local decree these cities have declared themselves havens from the accelerating pace of life in the global economy. In Bra, population 27,866, the town fathers have declared that all small food shops be closed every Thursday and Sunday. Theyforbid cars in the town square, on the ground that traffic is "a precursor to stress." All fruits and vegetables served in local schools must be organic. The city offers cut-rate mortgages to homeowners who renovate using a local butter-colored stucco and reserves choice commercial real estate for family shops selling handmade chocolates or specialty cheeses. And if the movement leaders get theirway, the slow ethos will gradually spread across Europe.
That's a lot less far-out than it sounds. Founded 15 years ago, Slow Food was at first a reaction to the proliferation of McDonald's outlets around Italy. Committed to combating "the evils of fast food" and, in a larger way, the global spread of the American 24/7/365 work culture, the movement now has 66,000 adherents around the world. Theymobilize to protect local products from being driven into extinction by global brands. And, true to their name, they hold lots of really long lunches and dinners celebrating obscure sheep's-milk cheeses or cave-cured lard. "At the heart of our mission is the right to pleasure," says Slow Food's international director, Renato Sardo. "That can often be misunderstood by the Anglo-Saxon world."
Theargument for a Slow Europe is not only that slow is good, but also that it can work. In 1999 Slow Food gave birth to the Slow City movement, which started in the tiny Tuscan town of Greve and has since spread throughout Italy. The organization has turned around local economies by promoting local goods and tourism, and now has a waiting list of cities hoping to copy the success of its members. YoungItalians are moving from larger cities to Bra, where unemployment is only 5 percent, about half the nationwide rate. Slow food and wine festivals draw thousands of tourists every year. Shops are thriving, many with sales rising at a rate of 15 percent per year. "This is our answer to globalization," says Paolo Saturnini, the founder of Slow Cities and mayor of Greve.
As Europe transforms itselfinto a single market as large and as rich as the United States, the question of how to define the new Europe has never been more pressing. But the continent is in no rush. The sputtering of America's high-tech, high-stress New Economy has European leaders increasingly skeptical of a U.S. model they seemed eager to copy as recently as the EU summit in Lisbon last year. Urged on by Anglo PrimeMinister Tony Blair, the summiteers agreed then to push an aggressive, American-style plan to free capital and labor markets, and generally minimize government limits on the freedom of corporations and the pace of working life.
That was then. Now each new piece of bad news from Nasdaq seems to reaffirm Europe's old fear of brutally free U.S. markets. While George W. Bush was touring the Continent thismonth, the European Union was pondering new rules that would make it easier to block megamergers, stop layoffs, regulate the Internet and generally tame the frenetic qualities of the New Economy. The Slow Cities are only an extreme case of a backlash against the American culture of haste that is showing up in European views on law and economics, even its latest lifestyle trends.
France is the...