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A few days without phone signal in Milan becomes an unexpected lesson in paying attention. Back home in Mayo, bluebell season is in full bloom, reminding us how much there is to notice when we slow down.
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MILAN
I had no mobile phone coverage for five days in Milan, and it was wonderful.
We had travelled to the Salone del Mobile and the wider design festival, but my Irish phone refused to work. For almost a week, my phone was reduced to a camera, a clock and the trusty notes app.
Thankfully, Gearóid’s phone still worked, so between us we had Google Maps and access to wifi in the evenings at our Airbnb. Because without Google Maps, we would probably still be circling Milano Centrale.
But during the days, I existed in a state of unplanned phone-free peace: no emails, no notifications, no Instagram, no 24-hour news, no podcasts, no Substack newsletters waiting to improve me.
Donald Trump evaporated.
Wars ended.
Oil prices ceased to fluctuate.
And most strikingly, so did any sense of fomo — the fear that somewhere else in Milan something better was happening and we were missing it.
Had my phone worked, I know exactly what I would have been doing. I would have spent the week “optimising” our time in Milan. I would have been one of the people standing in queues scanning “Top 25 Hidden Installations You Must See”. I would have checked maps compulsively while on trains. I would have worried constantly about my phone battery dying. I might even have decided to stand in line for hours because someone online I had never met had declared something “unmissable”.
Instead, I experienced the increasingly unfamiliar sensation of quiet, empty mental space. The moments between seeing shows — waiting for a tram, sitting silently on the metro, standing outside exhibitions, waiting for a friend — no longer needed to be filled.
I watched whatever was happening right in front of me. I watched Milan.
At bus stops, I watched people watching their phones.
I noticed how many people were wearing the very same pair of New Balance trainers.
I looked up into the tree canopy overhead.
I watched the still blue sky.
I looked down and watched leafy shadows move across the pavement.
I watched an endless array of tiny Milanese cars squeezing into even tinier parking spaces and double-parking around corners.
I watched the people coming in and out of their apartment buildings with surprisingly large dogs.
I watched people queue, then queue again, in that always-baffling Italian system of double-queueing.
I watched the vintage glass light fittings on the trams.
I watched people looking at exhibitions.
One evening, I stood alone outside Bar Basso waiting to meet friends and watched the crowd of international design tourists chatting and drinking. I watched groups of people greeting one another in an endless display of international greeting styles: rapid double cheek kisses, one-armed hugs, affectionate shoulder touches and formal handshakes.
I smiled at people.
I watched how friendly and open people were in such a large city.
Each evening back at the apartment, I made a small list of things I wanted to see in my phone's notes app. Into the note, I added the name of a designer, brand or exhibition, along with only the street name and number. I gave it the note, the low-pressure heading “would be nice to see”.
We developed a pattern of beginning each day with an item or two from that list, but as we met people along the way each day, we asked them what they had seen and what they would recommend. Then we followed their recommendations.
One day, we met our friend Sveva at the Marimekko café, where we sat for some time, chatted and caught up. She suggested the Bruno Munari room at the ADI Design Museum — not officially part of the festival at all, but one of the highlights of our trip.
Later, our friends Risa and Yasu mentioned Studiomama at Tinyspace Gallery. It was nearby, so we walked there.
There we met Jack, who suggested an exhibition nearby at the Fondazione Vico Magistretti, and, in return, we told him about Munari's work we had just seen.
At the Fondazione Vico Magistretti, we sat quietly in a green courtyard before hearing music somewhere down the street and wandering, without any great intent, into another installation entirely. This was easily the most bizarre, most Milan event we experienced — somewhere we would never have ended up otherwise.
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There are many highly efficient ways to “do” Milan Design Week. The internet offers maps, rankings and endless “best of” lists. But expecting to see everything is impossible.
The official Salone del Mobile fair at Rho Fiera this year hosted more than 1,900 exhibitors spread across 169,000 square metres. Beyond that sits the sprawling ecosystem of events known as Fuorisalone: more than 1,000 satellite events scattered across courtyards, apartments, galleries, monasteries and half-abandoned industrial buildings across the city.
The week is an overwhelming banquet of never-ending visual stimulation and ideas. So we decided to sample each course lightly, leaving time in between to digest and enough room in our stomachs to savour things properly. We aimed to leave enough room for surprise, wonder and properly paying attention.
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Lately, I have been thinking of how we consumed news in my house growing up - RTE Radio 1's Morning Ireland on the radio while eating breakfast, my father with The Irish Times newspaper spread across the table at lunchtime, RTÉ News: Six One on television as dinner was prepared, often followed by the current affairs show Prime Time later that evening. There was always a lot of news. But it arrived at set intervals. Today ... it arrives continuously, fragmented and flattening everything into equal urgency at all times.
In the overabundance of stimulation at Salone, I was reminded that our attention is finite and valuable. The question is not simply what deserves our attention, but whether we are experiencing anything fully enough once we give it.
Herbert Simon began outlining the idea now known as the attention economy in the early 1970s. “A wealth of information,” he wrote, “creates a poverty of attention.” It was a prescient observation. Long before smartphones or social media, Simon understood that the problem would no longer be access to information, but the inability to escape it.
Though I find myself returning less to economists than to Patrick Kavanagh. In his poem Advent, first published as Renewal in 1942, he arrived at something similar from a different direction: “We have tested and tasted too much — Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.” Kavanagh was writing decades before the internet, yet he identified the same diminishing effect of overexposure. Wonder, like attention, turns out to be finite.
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MAYO.
When we came home to Mayo, I went to the woods with our eldest daughter to see the bluebells in bloom. We brought “the big camera”. I wanted to teach her a little about photography, about aperture, exposure, focus and using photography to pay attention to how light falls.
We wait in the woods until the sun dips below the clouds, but before it sets for the night.
“We are watching and looking at the light,” I explain to her. “See how low it is in the sky and how it slants through the trees... See how the light catches on some trees and see it land in puddles on the floor of the forest... See how differently it looks when you look back into the light compared to when you turn around and look where it falls... Watch how the light creates shadows... See how it flickers and catches on the shiny leaves of holly. See how it flares in the camera lens..."
We open and close the lens, creating long and short exposures. We drew the focus in on a single flower head and allowed the background to blur into darkness. We watched as the lights drops lower in the sky and the shadows grew longer, and the forest grows darker.
We chat about school, an art project she is working on and a birthday cake she wants to make.
We pass the “big camera” back and forth between us.
We get eaten by midges.
The forest grows cold.
We slow down.
It gets darker.
We pay attention.
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