Southern Europe wages lifestyle warfare on summering Americans

Summer in Europe moves to East Hampton following spate of constipation, cell outages, allergies, and impractically tiny rental cars

Listen to an audio recording of the text below if you are too busy summering in Europe to read:

“I haven’t pooped in four days,” sobs Alexandra, a 28-year-old nutritionist and wellness influencer from Venice Beach who had planned to spend as long as necessary in Sicily to be able to say that she was living her best White Lotus life. “The only green thing I’ve seen on my plate the past week is pesto.” Influencers, tech entrepreneurs, single-SKU fad-based consumer product company founders, venture capitalists, and post-economic gypsies who had planned to park themselves in southern Europe for the summer are frantically booking return travel to the United States and begging their more domestic friends – whom they disdained as sheltered only weeks earlier – for shares in their parents’ Hamptons houses after experiencing untenable lifestyle inconveniences in Italy, France, and the other Southern European countries that people go to who can’t quite afford Italy and France.

“There is literally no such thing as a side of sautéed Lacinato kale, spinach, or broccoli in this country,” says Alexandra’s boyfriend, Gus, a tantric meditation healer who still has hat-head below his manbun after retiring his custom-made flat-brimmed Nick Fouquet hat eight months ago when hats were were correlated with being tedious. “I don’t understand how no one in this country eats dark leafy greens. Wasn’t arugula invented in Italy?” he demands. Alexandra throws her hands up in the air.

“I ordered a salad at this totally charming aggrotourism-”  

“-agriturismo,” corrects Gus, tediously.

“-country hotel that makes their own organic olive oil, and the waiter brought me a bowl of potatoes,” says Alexandra, who had changed her Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram profile name to Alessandra for the summer. “Then I asked for the vegetable of the day, and they brought me this oily brown goop of diced eggplant and capers and olives. I don’t remember what they called it-”

“Capponata,” offers Gus.

“-but like, the restaurant has its own garden. What do they grow in that thing? Is it all fucking nightshades? What’s wrong with planting a few heads of lettuce? I would literally kill him for even some iceberg at this point,” says Alessandra. Gus looks at her and nods.

“I would kill her, too,” he says.

Despite the famed verdancy of Southern Europe, summering younger Americans from New York, Miami, Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other blue cities that house entitled, obsessively fussy eaters have found a deathly dearth of dark leafy greens.

“People who eat a lot of dark leafy greens are typically very anxious,” says Dr. Lipton Feinberg, a gastroenterologist at Cedars Sinai, “and when these people don’t think they’re eating enough dark leafy greens, their anxiety causes psychosomatic constipation.” Dr. Feinberg reported a 700% uptick in requests for medical-grade laxatives from patients between the ages of 25 and 50 summering in southern Italy. “I tell them to have a nice glass of chianti, eat a plate of beef tartare, and take a hero dose of mushrooms.”

While visitors to Italy suffer from dark leafy green deprivation, Americans summering in France, who say merci after asking in English for the wifi password in stores where they buy nothing, suddenly found last week that they had no cell service.  

“What is the point of being in Paris if I can’t post stories of me flaking apart the perfect croissant?” demands Lindsey, the founder of a CBD gummy company that is now being entirely run by an MBA who has 1/40^th her equity in the business, which was failing before the placement of new management by her family’s family office, who backed the company in 2021. AT&T and other carriers sent apologies today via text message to their customers, promising to credit them for the days they had to spend looking at physical things in Europe instead of looking at their American screens, which showed them stories posted by other Americans summering in Southern Europe.

On the topic of screens, Google searches spiked in June for ‘how do I turn on this Euro shower.’

“I consider myself significantly smarter than the average smart person,” says Ryan, “but I could not figure out how the fuck to operate this shower.” He holds up a photo of the gleaming plumbing apparatus in his Cote d’Azur Airbnb bathroom. It looks like a chrome-plated Rubix cube from an obscure early 1980s sci-fi art film. “Like, I turn it one way, and the fucking hand-shower attachment spits out cold plunge water, and I turn it the other way and I get magma from the overhead shower. I spent an hour turning these stupid cubes and just said fuck it, I’ll go for a swim.”

“I almost died like thirty times a day,” says Jake, a 36-year-old retiree from Tribeca who is summering in various destinations around Southern Europe in order to actually go out on dates with the EU-based Latvian Instagram models with whom he had matched on Raya over the past six years. “It’s like every single dude on a bike and behind the wheel of one of those weird, shitty Euro cars that don’t get imported to the US is aiming for me every time I set foot on a road. Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to get flattened by a fucking Peugeot?” Thousands of other similarly unproductive younger people who subsist on exit proceeds, fund carry distributions, trust funds installments, and flat whites have reported an uptick of near-death experiences on Southern European roads. Transportation perils in Southern Europe are apparently not limited to pedestrians.

“They tried to give me one of those three-wheel scooters when I went to pick up my rental car,” says Casey, a part-time therapist and plant medicine shaman who is about to be priced out of Nashville after being priced out of Austin after being priced out of Williamsburg. “It was literally smaller than my three suitcases. Like, what am I supposed to do – get a backpack?” Rental cars in Europe have inversely shrunk with the expansion of luggage required to not just visit but fully summer in Europe.  A car in the compact rental class was once large enough to accommodate a throuple from Mill Valley, CA, their adopted child, and four suitcases, while a compact today is a Lime scooter. Despite the number of ecru knit shirts, billowy linen pants, and MDMA capsules that Global Nomads packed into their RIMOWA suitcases, none of them apparently brought Claritin.  

“I read on Reddit that if you sneeze too many times in one day you could have an aneurism,” says Gillian, a wide-eyed, frail, 20something brunette from San Francisco with puffy red eyes and a swollen red nose. “Like, I’ve produced my bodyweight in mucus in the past 48 hours. I’m sneezing so hard that I have to hold my eyes because I’m afraid they’ll fall out. The only time I’ve left my Airbnb was to go to the pharmacy, and the pharmacist just gave me this stuff.” She holds up a rectangular box in a soothing shade of light green that features an impressionist rendering of a plant and absolutely no warning labels. “I seriously think these people hate us and want us to leave Europe.”

After promising anonymity to an official with the Palermo branch of the Italian Ministry of Tourism, who is named Stefano Pasquale Casiraghi Cerami, I learned that the sufferings and inconveniences of Euro summering Americans are a not series of accidents and coincidences. Stefano, who is 36 years old and lives at Via Valerio Villareale 6, tells me in confidence that the swelling number of Americans who max out their number of permissible days in Schengen Area countries has sparked concern across EU governments that idle Americans would have a bad influence on Europeans who are already pretty idle.

“Italians are having a coffee and a hand-rolled cigarette for maybe two, three hours in the day,” says Stefano, whose birthday is April 19^th. “But American Millennials – che cazzo, ma nooo – they have the oat milk cappuccino for three hours, then the oat milk macchiato for two hours, then the pizzetta for two hours, and then the Aperol Spritzes many hours after Spritz o’clock,” he says, brushing his dark brown hair from his large forehead with his left hand, which has an oblong birthmark and a signet ring bearing his family’s crest. “So all of the EU tomato countries, we agree together that we make life a little less parfetto for the Americanos who are crowding our beaches and organic farmers markets and using our wifi for their Zoom calls. It’s time to make Europe European again,” he concludes.

It is estimated that constipated, disconnected, unshowered, shell-shocked, Lime-riding, sneezing Americans made up approximately 13% of the population of Italy, France, Greece, Spain, and Portugal on July 3 and comprised 97% of the population of Delta flights leaving these countries on July 4. Airbnb and hotel vacancy rates in American beach towns dropped to 0% today.  

“Fuck Europe,” says Jake. “I’m summering on Chadtucket.”