For reference, aside from a few, sometimes bizarre, sightings — like in the crowd for the election of the new pope at the Vatican, and running various marathons — 32-year-old Harry has been enjoying a quiet life away from the spotlight since his world tour came to an end in July 2023.
But now, he is gearing up for the release of his long-awaited fourth studio album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, and while working the promo circuit, he reflected on the slower pace of life that he enjoyed after relocating to Italy in his break.
In a profile for the Sunday Times, it was revealed that shortly after his 30th birthday in 2024, Harry lived in a rented house just outside of Rome with his friend Alessandro Michele, the former creative director at Gucci. The star recalled: “It was a big, important, transitional moment for me — to stop working and be settled somewhere for a while. I was settling into that life and a new space. I was aware of how pivotal that time in my life was going to be.”
Later in the interview, Harry was asked what he had been up to for the past two and a half years, and he said: “At the end of the tour, the idea of taking time out felt insane. I didn’t know if I could do it. But it was the right time for me — we’d finished the tour in July and I was turning 30 in February. It was time for me to stop for a bit and pay some attention to other parts of my life.”
“Italy has become really special to me over the past few years,” Harry then added. “I drove from London to Rome during Covid, in that time when you could travel. I’d spent all my years before that touring — with little gaps in between — and if I had a week off, I’d never have driven somewhere, I would have got there and back as fast as possible. Presented with this time, I drove there — and I thought: ‘I’m going to enjoy doing this.’ When I was in Rome, the city just taught me how to slow down.”
“Italy became so important to me because I was so used to everything moving so quickly and being on the go, but then I remember going to a café and sitting and having a coffee and thinking: ‘I don’t remember the last time I sat down and had a coffee — if I’ve ever sat down and just had a coffee,’” he went on. “I was suddenly learning, through my friends, that eating a meal is more than just sitting down and refuelling. I realized the pleasure in just being in the moment of what you’re doing. The Romans are the best at that — that’s their speciality. The pace they’ve taught me has been so special.”
And this is the part of Harry’s interview that many took issue with, with social media users calling out his claim that a slow lifestyle is the “speciality” of people who live in Rome, as well as his apparent lack of awareness of the wealth and privilege that actually afforded him this lifestyle. To give you a vibe of the general conversation, one viral tweet, which has been liked more than 137,000 times, says in response to Harry’s comment: “the privilege to call italian life ‘slow’ is so ironic. you are privileged to sit down and sip your coffee in comfort somewhere in italy because you are a wealthy man, not because you’re in italy. dumbass.”
Italian people also weighed in, with a popular tweet translating to English as: “Meanwhile, this says that the Romans are laid-back and in Rome he discovered slow living. ROME. Slow living. The rich truly live in a parallel reality.”
Harry did not publicly comment on the backlash at the time, but fans think that he subtly acknowledged the response in his recent interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, which was released on Wednesday. It was actually Zane who brought it up, telling Harry: “When you went to Italy, it wasn’t a surprise to me because we’d spoken about it… What is it about Rome? What was it about that place that drew you back?”
“It was just a place that, for me, I was able to slow down for the first time,” Harry replied. “Sitting down to have a coffee. It doesn’t mean I was sitting down to have a coffee all day. I was doing other things also.”
“To me, it wasn’t about the coffee,” he went on. “It wasn’t about the thing. It was about the appreciation that is in the way of life there. Of how special they treat food, how special they treat their relationships with each other, how special they treat time that is spent together.”
“Ultimately, I think it comes back to appreciating the love around you and the time you have,” Harry concluded. “It was, for me, just the right time to… I think I knew that if I keep just going, and I stop this tour, and I just make another record, and then I go tour that, I’m going to do it this way for the rest of my life without ever taking a moment to check in with myself about, like: ‘Am I even processing how special this is?’ Because you can’t miss something if you don’t go anywhere. You have to give some space to allow for something to show up as special again.”
Reacting to this part of the interview, one person tweeted: “the fact that harry kept emphasizing ‘FOR ME’ about being able to take it in slow in italy and that he wasn’t sitting and drinking coffee alllll day lmaoo he def saw that tweet.”
“harry talking about the sitting down and having coffee controversy HELP IM CRYING HES ON TWITTER,” somebody else wrote, while another added: “not harry addressing the hate he got when talking about sitting down and having a coffee in italy that is FRYING ME.”