Festina Lente: In Search of Meaning, Not Momentum
The Road I Didn’t Take (And the One I Built Instead)
It wasn’t that I was running away from the road most people take. It’s just that I couldn’t quite convince myself to walk it.
It was straight and predictable: you take your little art history degree, you do the interviews, you climb the ladder. Sotheby’s. Or maybe Christie’s.
You wear the blazer. You write the emails. And if you do it well enough, maybe someone will remember your name. Or at least where you sat at the table.
There was a time I thought I genuinely wanted that. Structure is seductive when you grow up being told that passion isn’t a plan. And I could’ve done it—I knew exactly whom to email, what to say, and how to phrase cover letters just right. Impressively forgettable.
But when the time came to choose it, I hesitated.
Is this where I want my best years to go? I asked myself. To become a very small name in a very large system?
Then I realized I didn’t want to spend the next 20 years of my life asking for permission to do something meaningful. I wanted to start now.
So I got off the road.
Or maybe I stayed exactly where I was and let the road move without me.
A Different Path: Festina Lente
Festina Lente began not with a business plan, but more so with our desire to share our way of living and appreciating beauty that is beautifully encapsulated in this Latin phrase: make haste slowly.
It’s a weird motto to live by in your twenties, when everyone else seems to be sprinting. And it’s definitely not what people expect from two young founders. But then again, nothing about our journeys have been typical.
Our founder Roy Yu had spent over a decade moving between embassies and art fairs. A trained diplomat and lifelong collector, he had seen how culture is preserved—and how easily it’s lost in the noise. I, the creative director, came from a background in Art History and French Literature, fueled by curiosity, storytelling, and a refusal to treat beauty as an afterthought.
Together, we asked a simple question: “What if there were a place—a platform, a movement—that helped people see again?”
So we built Festina Lente: part cultural platform, part travel atelier, part way of life.
We create journeys, films, content, and experiences that help people move through the world with their eyes open. From walking through a Florentine cloister at sunset, to sitting with a forgotten artisan in Naples, to making a documentary about slowness in Istanbul—everything we do is about restoring meaning to how we see, travel, and live.
We see Festina Lente as the beginning of a modern Renaissance.
We want to be the go-to destination for meaningful lifestyle, for those seeking depth, not distraction.
And more than anything, we want to wake something up in people. A reminder that beauty is not a decoration or a pretty marketing term, but as direction in life.
And Now, a Film
This year, we wrapped our eponymous documentary, the first of many to come.
We shot in Florence, Naples, London, and Istanbul. We interviewed artisans, museum directors, and people who still believe in beauty. We filmed in sacred spaces after closing. We interviewed artisans whose work will never appear in a museum. The film is about slowness, but also memory and belonging. Not the kind you inherit through passports or blood, but the kind you build—by choosing what to notice, what to return to.
It premieres this December at the Italian Embassy in Beijing. That sentence still doesn’t feel real.
What Keeps Me Going
I live a very busy life to say the least, but it doesn’t feel like a job in the way people usually mean. It feels like building something I’d been trying to find for years. I get to wake up and ask: what story do I want to tell today? What part of the world can I help someone see differently? And when fans tell me they watched one of our videos and cried because they finally felt understood—well, that’s a better KPI than anything a company could’ve given me.
Of course, there are days when it’s lonely. When I wonder if I’ve made things harder than they needed to be.
But every step has been mine. Every pivot, every risk, every 2 a.m. breakthrough—mine.
And that, I’ve learned, is the kind of win I never want to trade.
