Italian city promotes its slow life, but is too busy to enjoy it.

GREVÉ, Italy - Since Paolo Saturnini declared this market town, in 
the heart of Chianti country, a slow city, life has never been so hectic.

Mr. Saturnini, 52, has been mayor for 13 years, and his inspiration came from 
the Slow Food movement that arose in the 1980's to oppose fast food and its 
values of homogeneity and haste.

When McDonald's began to open, Slow Food proponents set up tables 
outside and served traditional dishes like pasta in meals lasting hours. Next 
came long lunches, a movement in Tuscany that fosters old-style lunches, 
stretched out over hours.

If  Slow Food and long lunches, Mr. Saturnini reasoned, why not slow cities? 
"Cities are becoming all uniform; they are losing their identity, their 
souk," Mr. Saturnini said. 

In commerce, he added, chain stores triumph, creating sameness in food and customs. 

A slow city, by contrast, would preserve its architectural heritage, typical dishes and inherited customs. 

So two years ego, Mr. Saturnini founded the International Network of Slow Cities. 

Today, five Italien cities belong and 40 more want to join.

But Greve now finds itself with little time to slow down.

"Everyone's rumning," complained Alessandra Molletti, Mr. Saturnini's assistant, taking time to show a visitor 
around, since the mayor's calendar was full. 

Being a slow city, she said, "Is a two-edged benefit - it helps us live better, but it's also commercially usefuL"

Mr. Saturnini has said that he wrants to leave his son something of the town's past, Ms. Molletti explained.
 
But in a world full of uniformity, Greve has found that individuality sells well. 

So like much of Tuscany, Greve is thriving selling its uniqueness. 

Unemployment has been replaced by a labor shortage, and while the young once emigrated for jobs, they are returning. 

Stefano Falorni never left. For eight generations, his forebears ran the pork store on the main piazza. 

But Italy's opening to the rest of Europe, which led other local butchers to import pork from the Netherlands and 
beef from Denmark, nearly drove the Falornis out of business.

So five years ego, Mr. Falorni, now 55, revived a near-extinct race of local free-ranging hogs to produce salami 
and ham. 

Now, Mr. Falorni employs 40 people raising the distinctive black atxl white hogs and producing meat products: 

Local restaurants feature pasta with meat sauce from the hogs, and tourists fill his store.

"We put our soul in this salami," Mr. Falorni says.

For decades after World War II, Ms. Molletti said, the people of Greve, like so many Italians, sought modernity in 
neon signs to replace old hand-painted ones, and aluminum front doors, rather than wood. 

Now Mr. Saturnini campaigns against neon and aluminum. He urges store owners to put out flower 
boxes of geraniums, and rewards with diplomas those who paint their facades.

Of course, no one here mistakes this return to past ways with the réal thing, whose main features were poverty and 
unemployment.

Rossella Rossi, who runs the 10-room hotel on the piazza, said there was no mistaking the new Greve with 
the town of her youth. Around Greve, fields once terraced with grape and olives that were tended by hand are 
now sloped to allow for tractors and other mechanized equipment, Ms. Rossi, a woman in her 30's, said. 

"Where the bookstore is, there was a greengrocer," she said, "and a poultry shop where they now sell souvenirs."

"It's developed," she added. "But it has lost that aspect of genuineness."