Working From Rome

Creative Director Michael Sambar had the exciting opportunity to live in and work from Italy for the month of June. He shares his experience and the learnings he's brought back from the boot.

Thanks to a healthy YOLO mindset, combined with the normalization of the remote work lifestyle and an invitation from my wonderful partner studying ancient Roman frescoes, I was able to upgrade what would have been a routine June down in the ol’ home office to a magical month in the land of aperol, art, and arancini. Because I had already used up most of my vacation time for the year (according to said YOLO mindset), I figured I would simply continue to work a 40-hour, nine-to-five week — just transposed to Mediterranean time.

The fact that we’re able to work from anywhere in the world within range of a Wi-Fi signal is truly incredible, but it’s not without its pitfalls. Physically, we can be in a new location, but digitally and mentally, we are often somewhere else — wherever our work needs us to be. We juggle video meetings between CST, EST and PST, but we often forget to reset to me-ST. Immediately after booking my plane ticket I began questioning the feasibility of my plan. Would I be able to coop myself up in our Rome residence and put in eight hours of work every day? Would the allure of Italian culture distract me from my professional obligations? Would the seven–hour time difference between my colleagues, my clients and me affect our ability to collaborate? Would the stereotypically relaxed Italian lifestyle hinder my productivity?

Despite my hesitations, I had faith that I could navigate the situation and fulfill my duties as a good employee while still reserving nights and weekends to enjoy everything that Italy had to offer. Throughout my time there I was surprised and delighted by a handful of observations and learnings about creative assets over the ages, the design process through the lens of Italian public transit and the power of simplicity. Plus, there was amazing pizza at my fingertips on the reg.

Every graphic designer dreads the watermark. Those semi-transparent, obnoxious little motifs, deliberately added to obscure and make unusable that beautiful, $499 photograph are necessary evils that help make our designs perfect. Granted, the importance of watermarks is hard to dispute. In a time when intellectual property infringement gets easier by the minute with every OpenAI update, watermarks a simple and effective way to ensure that photographers get paid for their work.

On our first excursion to an ancient villa on the outskirts of Pompeii, I was mystified and delighted to discover that olden day looters had their own version of the watermark. Villa Stabiae, which was buried by the hot ashes of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., is famous for its highly detailed, absurdly well-preserved frescos. Colorful paintings of wild beasts, sumptuous feasts and mythical scenes decorate the walls of almost every room in the building. And while the frescoes are definitely marvels in their own right, what perplexed me even more were these occasional chunks of wall that were missing — totally blank areas where the painted layer of plaster had been removed in an extremely deliberate fashion. These patches would often be surrounded by smaller paintings covered in little clusters of gouges or what looked like chiseled pock marks. After noticing several of these pockmarked, chiseled mini-paintings, I started wondering what the deal was.

It turns out that these are the leftover markings of antiquity looters who, after having removed the big valuable pieces, intentionally damaged the smaller ones so that no looters after them could remove and sell them. It struck me that these art thieves must have experienced the same frustration upon encountering these chisel marks as I do when I see a watermark. The attainment of a perfect image just out of reach, paradoxically preserved by that which defaces it.

The trains in Italy run like clockwork. And when they don’t, they let you know exactly how long they’ll be delayed. The buses… not so much. Often we would find ourselves standing on the side of the road with dozens of other disgruntled commuters watching the buses go by – every bus except the one we needed to catch. 20 minutes would pass. 30 minutes would pass. Until it became clear that it just wasn’t going to arrive. Was there an accident? Was the driver taking an extra long cappuccino break? It was anyone’s guess.

In noticing the differences between Italian train-travel and Italian bus-travel, I started thinking of them as metaphors for the project-management process. With creative work, it’s extremely easy to spin your wheels and spend a whole lot of time doing, without actually doing something. Like a bus stuck in traffic, without a specific plan or clear route, the energy spent on a project can be like pumping gas into an idle engine. I was impressed by the arrival time boards at the train stations, which included a small column that indicated the number of minutes the train would be late – proactively communicating the delay. It reminded me of our own project management boards and the importance of managing expectations and timelines. Not all projects will be perfectly on-schedule, but with foresight and intentional communication they can move smoothly from point A to point B even with changes in timing. Perhaps our projects can run more like trains and less like buses.

Pizza, again? I thought to myself, as I scrolled hesitantly through the Google Maps results for ‘food near me’ from our little balcony. It was our third day in Naples and we had already eaten just as many alleged world’s-best-pizzas*. Can man live on a pizza alone? I privately ruminated.

“This place looks good,” I said, tapping a little red map pin. 18-minute walk from our apartment. 1,468 Google Reviews. 4.8 Star Average.

“That’s too many Google reviews,” Katie said, glancing at my phone. She was probably right. Over the course of our trip, we had established a rigorous technique for identifying the good – like, good good – places to eat in a new city. If it had too many Google reviews, and too high an average rating, it meant that too many non-discerning eaters had been there and enjoyed it. It meant it was bad.

The sweet spot, using our proprietary technique, is a restaurant with a very high average rating (4.5 stars or more), but only a modest number of reviews – five hundred max. This ensures that only snobs have eaten there. And that only snobs have reviewed it.

“How about this one,” she said, tapping on another little red map pin just a few pins away from the first one. 21-minute walk from our apartment. 239 Google Reviews. 4.9 Star Average.

“Yeah, this place looks good.” We slipped our shoes on and headed off to eat our fourth world’s-best-pizza of the week.

The pizzas in Italy are small enough that two average adults who have been sitting all day can comfortably eat two in one shot. This allowed for us budding pizzanauts to conduct an ongoing nightly tournament to determine the best flavor of pizza. The logical starting point was something safe and classic (Margherita) vs. something a little spicier and foreign (N’Duja). On Night 1, Margherita won by a narrow but unanimous margin. For the rest of the week, (approximately eight pizza’s later) Margherita was the undisputed champion, with Mortadella Pistachio as an unexpected runner-up.

“Are we just, like, boring?” I asked Katie as I sipped a glass of Amaro and gazed at the 11:00pm whirring Naples nightlife, reflecting on how many Margheritas we had eaten, and enjoyed. “There’s no way that something so basic can be this good.” Especially with such heavy hitters as Chicken Bacon Ranch and Hawaiian out there. I was distressed by the idea that the simple combination of basil, tomato, and mozzarella could be so amazing. All those years of eating Smokey the Bandit and ranch-dipped Topperstix were… misspent?

And then I realized the power of simplicity: when something is simple, the impact of its individual components can be experienced more strongly. This is as true for pizza as it is for good design. The fewer colors, the more each singular color can sing. The fewer fonts, the more distinctly the voice of each letterform can come through, free of interference. And the same applied to pizza: tomatoes bright and sweet, cheese fatty and salty, and the floral bitters of basil all working together, not getting in each other’s way, enhancing and complementing each other’s differences. Simple reigns supreme.

No matter how you slice it, there are pros and cons to being remote. Especially so when you’re working for a US company from Europe. While I’m returning from this trip with the jury still out on whether I maxed out my productivity, I take refuge in knowing that I accumulated tons of new experiences.

How does that saying go? Maybe the real remote work was the friends we made along the way.