JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
If you ever feel like hiding out from the news, well, that impulse is hardly unique. There's a related expression from Italy that can mean to insulate yourself from the world's unpleasantness. NPR's Neda Ulaby explains.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: I learned about this expression from an article by Rachel Donadio in The New York Review of Books.
RACHEL DONADIO: Technically, it's just a phrase that means to tend your garden - to cultivare l'orticello.
ULABY: It means, she says, to focus on your little world.
DONADIO: An orticello is technically a little garden. An orto is a garden where you grow generally vegetables, maybe also flowers.
ULABY: To cultivate your garden means staying in your comfort zone. Now, she says, some left-wing Italian intellectuals are using it as an accusation. Like, you're in your little garden, ignoring the world's problems and the unpopular policies of Italy's far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
DONADIO: Many writers and cultural figures aren't really stepping up and criticizing the Meloni government. Instead, they're turning more inward. They're tending the orticello. They're tending their own garden. They don't really want to stick their necks out. They don't really want to take a strong stand, criticizing certain actions by the administration.
ULABY: Instead, they're writing safe, fictionalized memoirs and other inward-looking work...
DONADIO: That didn't take on large, historical themes with giant sweep.
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ULABY: An exception, she says, is the best-selling writer Antonio Scurati. His popular series of novels called "M" - for Mussolini - tracks the rise of Italian fascism and were recently adapted to television by Joe Wright, who directed prestigious adaptations of novels like "Atonement" and "Pride And Prejudice."
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, speaking Italian).
ULABY: Here in the U.S., this might feel familiar. A few books (ph) shows cultural leaders seem to meet the moment. Many more avoid it. The Italian expression to cultivate your little garden, though, is not fundamentally partisan, Donadio says.
DONADIO: The concept of the orticello - this ancient Italian concept of kind of tending your own garden - is really something that can help us survive in whatever political turmoil we have now.
ULABY: By not getting swamped in relentless waves of news and information, by instead digging down.
DONADIO: The garden, the roots, the soil, the place where we are.
ULABY: It can be a sort of opposition, she says, to large abstract forces.
DONADIO: Like the algorithms that seem to have so much more control over our lives.
ULABY: No matter your political bent, Donadio says, this expression speaks to a moral dilemma facing everyone concerned about inhumanity, war, the environment and the future.
DONADIO: How can we still stay fully engaged as moral and political actors in the larger context without completely retreating, being ostriches, putting our heads in the sand and ignoring it?
ULABY: By going to our little metaphorical gardens for sustenance, she says, not surrender.
Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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