Old post #1: Rome

This is the write-up from 2007's big trip, to Rome.

Friday (Day One)
It turns out Thanksgiving Day IS the perfect day to fly to Europe. While the train out to Newark was packed (unfortunately the Macy’s Day Parade had just ended), the international terminal at the airport was deserted. I was the only person at the Alitalia counter, and all the stores and restaurants were staffed with skeleton crews. I settled in at a café and ordered enough wine to ensure that I would be able to sleep on the flight. The flight itself was uneventful, despite all the horror stories I’d heard about Alitalia. The trick, obviously, is not to check luggage. I took one tiny duffel bag, two feet long by one foot tall, and my purse (which, admittedly, was bigger). What I packed: the bare minimum of toiletries, one pair of jeans, one pair of cords, three cashmere sweaters, one cashmere dress, one pair of heels, and one extra set of bra/underwear/socks. Undies and socks got washed in the sink every night, and including the sweater and pair of jeans I was wearing on the plane, ensured that I had plenty of clothes to swap around. Plus books, camera, etc., but you get the idea. And I only brought those same two bags back.

But enough about my packing prowess. The jet lag wasn’t as bad as I’d feared—with a couple of hours’ sleep on the plane, and a two-hour power nap Friday afternoon, I was golden. In fact, I stayed out until 2 am Friday night (more on that later). The customs official in Rome barely glanced at my passport; in fact, he didn’t even stamp it. He just waved me through. I found the train station and caught an express to Termini, the central Rome train station. Then I got my first lesson in Roman maps: namely, that Italians are very lassez-faire about signage. Only about half the streets were marked with signs, and those were marked with concrete blocks set into the side of a building—no “sign” per se at all. How people find their way around at night is beyond me. Exits off major highways aren’t marked (in fact, the highways usually aren’t marked), and subway/streetcar stops often didn’t have a sign, either. Even museums didn’t have signs or maps. So I’m sure I missed half the artistic glories of Rome. Grrr. (Side note: all the manhole covers are stamped with SPQR. Isn’t that cool?)

Nevertheless, armed with a shot of espresso, I found my way to the hotel (a ten-minute walk) no problem. The hotel was a steal, only €70 a night (about $100, maybe a little more) and was located on a quiet side street inside a normal residential apartment building. The room was tiny, and the bathroom plumbing had this annoying habit of going KER-CHUNK every two minutes when the hot water was on or the toilet tank was refilling, but I was only there to sleep, so I didn’t care. Plus I got free breakfast and free Internet usage via the guest laptop, and it was centrally located.

I had a hot shower, changed, and headed out into the world. I didn’t have a set itinerary for the day, because I wasn’t sure how the jet lag would affect me, so I started off near the hotel. My first stop was the Baths of Diocletian, followed by one of the Museums of Rome. Rome has no central museum—the city’s museum is split between four buildings, in four different collections. Another interesting factoid about Roman museums—often the building itself is just as impressive as the artwork within, as they are typically housed in renovated palaces. I had a long leisurely lunch at one of the city’s foremost wine bars, Trimani. (Roman restaurants are typically open until 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon, then they close until dinner, not reopening until 7:30 or 8. Italians don’t eat dinner til at least 8 or 9. If you get hungry between 3 and 8, you go to an enoteca, or wine bar, which serve snacky things and are open all afternoon and for dinner. Snacky things in Italy = plates of proscuitto and cheese, salads, olives, etc. Yum. It’s important to note that tap water and bread are not free in Italian restaurants; which is why most people order bottled or mineral water, since you pay for the water regardless. And if you don’t want to pay for the bread on the table, you don’t eat it.) At Trimani I had my first taste of an Italian classic, spaghetti with cheese and pepper, and another staple, chicory. Very simple but very good.

Then nap time. Then I re-girded my loins and set off in a different direction. This direction took me all over the touristy part of Rome, starting with the Trevi Fountain. Beautiful, but MOBBED. There was a sea of people thirty deep in front of it, all jockeying for prime photo-taking space. I have no idea how people survive in high tourist season, I really don’t. They must get trampled. I didn’t stay to contemplate its glories, I just snapped a picture and moved on. I did a walking tour of central Rome—I had no real itinerary, just wandered around. I saw Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Theresa” in the side niche of an unmarked church. I saw a crypt full of the bones of centuries of monks in another church—there were so many bones they had sculpted things out of them. A chandelier made from finger bones, altar frames made from shoulder blades, a room of nothing but skulls. I saw the Spanish Steps at night and walked down Via Condotti, ground zero for fashionable shopping in Rome. I saw the Pantheon, with a full moon shining through the hole at the top of the dome. (Yes, there’s a hole at the top of the dome—so when it rains, it rains all over the marble on the inside.) I walked through the ruins of Trajan’s Market and saw the full moon again, this time shining over the Colosseum in the distance, with some palm trees blowing in the breeze.

I moved on to dinner. I had a reservation at a little place in Trastavere, the formerly-gritty-but-now-gentrifying working-class section of Rome. Called Checchino dal 1887, it specialized in Roman cuisine—a.k.a., offal. Their specialty was pajata, calf intestines from an unweaned calf with mother’s milk still inside. Unfortunately, the only way to get it was to order the offal tasting menu. Confronted with eight courses of organ meat (brains, tripe, etc.), I chickened out and ordered “regular” food. Still very good, though. And I got a commemorative plate out of it.

I was going strong when I got back to the hotel, so I found an ex-pat bar nearby and settled in with a Guinness. I ended up meeting a guy from DC. Only I could go to Italy, pick up a random guy, and have him be from DC.

Saturday
Rome is not the ass-pinching heaven of macho guys I’d been led to believe. Maybe I’m now too old, or maybe I’ve just lived in NY too long and so naturally project that “don’t fuck with me” air when I’m moving through crowds, but I was not subjected to catcalls or crude attempts to pick me up. I did have several old guys ask me the time (all of whom were wearing watches) but no hot Italian studs roared up on their Vespas to whisk me away. Sigh.

Saturday was a busy day. I headed to the Vatican first thing, but when confronted with a line of 600 people waiting to get in (literally) I changed my mind. I walked over to St. Peter’s, but there was an equally long line to get inside the basilica, so I just took pictures from the outside and walked down to Castel Sant’Angelo, the old fortress of the Popes. It was beautiful, and strange. Walls twelve and fifteen feet thick, old catapults and weaponry laying around, luminous tapestries and paintings in the fortress interior. And fantastic views of Rome from the battlements.

I headed back into central Rome and covered a number of smaller museums, most attached to the Museum of Rome system (Museo di Roma, Palazzo Altemps, Galleria Pamphilj). In a couple, I was the only person there. A nice change from the Vatican. I passed through Piazza Navona, home of Bernini’s Four Rivers of the World fountain, but it was under a scaffolding. Boo. Lunch was some lovely homemade cannelloni and a bufalo mozzarella salad. I got caught in a thunderstorm on the way to the Capitoline Museums, but the museums were large enough to dry me off while I wandered around the pickings of Ancient Rome. (Otherwise the weather was gorgeous—65 degrees every day, maybe mid-50s at night, clear and sunny. Three days after I got back to NY, it was 23 degrees and snowing.)

Then I headed down into the ancient Roman Forum, which really is literally a big pile of crap. Ruins on top of ruins, all left where they fell, with the Capitoline Museums at one end and the Colosseum at the other. I couldn’t help thinking what Americans would have done with this big pile—pried it all up, put it behind glass in a museum (with maps and signage, of course), and added tour guides, audioguides, ADA-approved handicapped ramps and bathrooms every fifty feet for good measure. And that would have completely sucked all the joy out of it. Rome is a big jumble—a lot of old stuff, a lot of new stuff, a lot of old stuff repurposed as something else, and the city gets its charm and its energy from the fact that it is just a big pile of stuff.

I walked around the Forum and the Colosseum, then stopped off at my new favorite Roman enoteca, Cavour 313. A little dark place with wooden tables and thick wooden rafters reminiscent of a German beer hall, but with such yummy things to eat and a wine list miles long. I had a fantastic beef carpaccio with hot spices and oil, served with fresh anchovies (fresh; with the skin still on, a very different creature from the weird things we get in cans packed in oil), very large capers, and red onion. The waiter didn’t speak English; fortunately I’m fluent in pointing and in food Italian (carpaccio; proscuitto; formaggi; chianti).

Another side note: as I was getting ready for dinner at the hotel, I turned on the TV. It was all in Italian, of course, and I cannot tell you how trippy it is to watch Bugs Bunny overdubbed in Italian. Bugs Bunny has such a distinctive voice, and it was gone, replaced by some nasal Italian actor. It was the same thing with Men in Black: Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith have very distinctive voices. All gone, replaced with new voices in Italian. So you can imagine what Italian MTV is like.

La Pergola
Quite literally the best meal I’ve ever had. Of course, it should have been, given what I paid for it (also the most expensive meal I’ve ever had). But it was glorious. It was my first full meal in a three-Michelin-star joint, and now I see why three Michelin stars is such a big deal.

La Pergola is widely noted to be the best restaurant in Rome (run by a German, of all things) and one of the top in Europe. The whole evening was divine. The service was beyond exquisite, four hours of gustatory heaven. The restaurant is on the top floor of the Hilton Cavalieri, which is set a few kilometers outside of Rome on top of a big hill—so that you get a panoramic view of the city. The table was set for one when I got there, in a prime location. I got a little stool for my handbag I could pull up to the chair. The dishes and flatware were all gold, and were changed for each course. The candles were changed for each course. The stemware was all top-end Riedel crystal. The servers were all in full tuxedos. I got a personal escort to the restroom door every time I went (three or four times, it was a four-hour dinner—and let me tell you, after a tasting menu of five different wines, it’s handy to have someone to lean on when you go to the bathroom). If you forgot your reading glasses, they brought out a box with several different pairs, in different strengths, for you to select from and use. When I was seated, a guy wheeled over a special champagne cart, with several different kinds of champagne. He explained the selections and poured me one, so that I could enjoy a complementary glass of champagne while I perused the menu.

And it just went up from there. I got a water menu (a water menu!), with fifty different waters to choose from. (Most expensive: €30. My selection: Evian, €10, with its own gold ice bucket to keep it cold.) A waiter carefully explained and decanted the olive oil at my table, then offered me a selection of fifteen different breads to go with it. As soon as I selected the bread, another waiter came forward with a tray of salts (yes, there was a salt selection process) and explained the tastes and provenance of each salt. I picked three; the black salt was the best (more on that later). It really made the olive oil pop.

I chose the nine-course tasting menu, with accompanying five-course wine tasting menu. I figured I might as well go all out while I was there. For an additional €85, I could have added a white truffle course (white truffles were in season), but I was spending enough as it was. However, someone else in the restaurant ordered the truffle course and JESUS GOD did those truffles smell good. The waiter brought out a big wooden box full of white truffles (thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth) and made a big show of putting on gloves and carefully shaving the truffle for each guest. The smell wafted across the entire restaurant. I wanted to ask him to bring the box over so I could smell it, but that seemed gauche.

But I digress. First up was the amuse bouche, with eggplant four ways accompanied by a sweet pepper sorbet. Each variation of eggplant was light and delicate, not chewy or bitter at all as eggplant often is, and the sweet pepper sorbet was sweet enough to complement the eggplant but peppery enough to be spicy. Wine 1 was Were Dreams Jermann 2005, a chard/pinot mix that wasn’t sweet but had a lovely fruity finish.

Course 1 was scallop carpaccio on a gelled layer of amaranth grain and black corn, with a ginger oil finish, sprinkled with crunchy ginger dust (sweet only, not spicy). The scallops were raw but WARM, which was lovely with the sweetness of the ginger.

Course 2 was two cylinders of scampi with olive oil powder and tapioca vinaigrette, with a line of mixed greens down one side of the plate and very very delicately fried zucchini flowers down the other side. Powder is the new thing in haute cuisine (it used to be foam), but I was underwhelmed by the powders. The texture was interesting, but the flavors were largely lost. That didn’t affect the superior quality of the scampi, though.

Wine 2 was a Cervaro Castello della Sala 2002, a chard aged in oak but without any oaky flavor whatsoever—just this subtle depth that kept getting deeper. That may have been because of the ENORMOUS glass it was served in, it was practically a fish bowl (with a flared lip). I’ve never seen a white served in such a big glass. But the sommelier said, “Big wine, big glass,” and he’s the expert.

Course 3 was very fresh, very delicate artichoke ravioli with grey mullet roe. All the ravioli I had in Rome were obviously hand-made (irregular, lumpy) but oh so fresh and good. I’ve decided to teach myself how to make fresh pasta.

Course 4 was red mullet with tomato wrapped inside a very thin flash-fried parchment—the inside was not scorching hot like most fried things, it didn’t even taste fried. Just warm and crispy on the outside, cool and rare on the inside.

Wine 3 was a Gewürztraminer Sanct Valentin 2006, San Michele Appiano. Very aromatic, very fruity, but still not sweet. Just vibrant and fruity.

Course 5 was amberjack (a red Mediterranean fish) served in a warm tomato-cannellini bean bisque, with ice-cold salt cod snow on the side. Again with the powder—the ice-cold contrasted well with the warm bisque, but I didn’t pick up any salt cod flavor. But the fish, as always, was excellent, very fresh, and the tomato-bean bisque was a nice contrast.

Course 6 was the foie gras course. Yum. Seared foie gras in a wild strawberry sauce with an amaretto gelee, and just a hint of parmesan on top. All that was unnecessary—I’ll take plain unadorned foie gras any day.

Wine 5 was the first (and only) red, thanks to all the fish on the menu. It was a Foradori Granato 2003, and went very well with Course 7: pigeon breast. Pigeon breast is a nice deep red color, like ostrich steak, and tastes like a cross between chicken and rabbit. It was served with dried corn kernels (interesting) and perfectly spherical potatoes (I’d hate to be that guy in the kitchen).

Then came my favorite part—the cheese course. Yum. When the waiter wheeled out the special cheese cart, with thirty different kinds of unpasteurized cheese, I literally quivered. Oh my God did it smell good. Each cheese got its own fork and knife to cut and serve it with. I got five different kinds, including a perfectly magical tellegio, and a hunk of parmesan with true sweet balsamico poured over it.

The dessert wine, a Ben Rye Passito di Pantelleria Donnafugata 2005 (I actually knew this one) tasted like apricots. The dessert course was a nine-course tasting menu in and of itself. First came the amuse bouche: a passionfruit sorbet with onion and cream. Sounds weird but very yummy. Then came the “magic box,” a silver box with twelve drawers, each drawer with a different sort of petit fours. Then the desserts started coming. A piping hot cinnamon soufflé, a pineapple cream, a frothy chocolate shot, caramel ice cream, a solidified chocolate cappuccino in a martini glass…they were all small, maybe a couple of bites each, but still, at one point I had eight different desserts in front of me—counting the box of petit fours as one. And then, when all that was cleared away, they brought out a tray of four types of purely chocolate petit fours.

The dessert wine was actually the sweetest part—the great thing about European desserts is that they’re not obnoxiously sweet like most American desserts. Most American dessert menus are a study in thick, molten chocolate cakes, with maybe an artificial key lime pie thrown in for good measure—and if you’re lucky, maybe a fruit sorbet or bread pudding. Nothing light, nothing delicate, nothing that wouldn’t send you into diabetic shock or isn’t drenched in syrup. It was such a nice change of pace to have so many desserts and not feel like I’d eaten a five-pound bag of sugar at the end.

After that, I got a separate coffee and tea menu and ordered the mint tea. They actually offered a pearl tea—in which gilded pearls were infused in mineral water heated to precisely 95 degrees. Cost: €40. This must taste good, or people wouldn’t order it, but a) I couldn’t bring myself to pay $60 for a cup of tea, and b) pearls? The mint tea was lovely. The waiter brought out a big silver Russian samovar to heat the water, then decanted it into a special teapot filled with fresh mint (I got to smell the mint). After it steeped, he poured me a cup of almost completely colorless tea—that smelled so much like mint and was the perfect temperature.

And of course, I got a warm napkin at the end of the meal. As I was signing the check, I mentioned to the waiter that I had really liked the black salt—did he know where in Rome I could procure some? He said he thought it was only available in Florence, and so I was sad. But as I was leaving, he presented me with both a card (with everything I’d had to eat and drink written down on it) and a big plastic bag full of the black salt, sent out with the chef’s compliments.

I love Rome.

Sunday
Sunday was a day of rest; given that I’d walked a total of almost ten miles in the last two days, my feet were a study in foot pain, and I’d discovered new painful leg muscles I didn’t even know I had. I was wearing state-of-the-art walking shoes, but central Rome is composed mostly of uneven square black cobblestones—killer for your feet over extended periods of time, regardless of the shoes.

Fortunately there wasn’t much walking. My friend Jim has a cousin in Rome, Lia, and he set me up with her. Lia was a sweetie, she picked me up at the hotel Sunday morning and drove me all around the outskirts of Rome so that I could get some lovely views. We went to an old orange garden, and a special gate up on a hill with a tiny keyhole cut into it. If you look through the keyhole, it perfectly frames St. Peter’s dome off in the distance. Then we drove back into the city, passing through Piazza del Popolo, and had lunch at Gusto, a famous restaurant in Rome (one of the first to have multiple locations) with a cooking store attached to it. I had the most wonderful four-cheese pizza, just fresh cheese and oil and dough. Sublime. I went to the Palazzo Barberini, another of those small art museums, and wiled away the afternoon at Bottega Caffe, a tiny place near the hotel where I had fresh gnocchi dripping with cheese.

Then Lia and her husband picked me back up and took me out to dinner in the ‘burbs, in another gritty-but-gentrifying neighborhood, in a restaurant where no one spoke English. (Most people in Italy speak a varying degree of English; I knew enough Italian to translate the menus and get the conversation started, but usually relied on the other person to pick up in English at some point. Most people didn’t even let me speak Italian, apparently I look so American that they automatically launched into English.) The restaurant was small but full; I had some great proscuitto di parma, cut into thick chunks instead of the usual semi-transparent slices; more handmade ravioli; and the most interesting digestif. Lia recommended it, saying it was from the fruit of a bush that grew only in southern Italy and was popular amongst Italians. Southern Italy must do a booming business in cough medicine bushes, then, because the liquor tasted exactly like cherry Robitussin.

Monday
Monday was back to the Vatican, this time two hours before the opening so that I could get a decent place in line. The line was fine, but once they let everyone in at once, the place was jammed. I still don’t know how anyone survives in high tourist season, they must get trampled. The Vatican Museums are sprawling, with a lot of small rooms, AND NO SIGNS. Not even a map. The only signs all pointed back to the Sistine Chapel—which was small but perfect, and full of color, and amazing, but also bursting at the seams with Japanese tour groups. I could have walked on the heads from one end to the other, literally. But I kept getting led back around to the Sistine Chapel, and all the hallways were full of tour groups just standing still in the middle of everything, and finally I left because I hated humanity so much.

St. Peter’s was slightly better, no line to get into the basilica this time. It’s enormous, and everything is gilded, and all the Popes are buried in the basement, which is a little creepy. There were some fine gourmet shops near there, I bought some different kinds of salt, some wild boar proscuitto and tellegio.

It was about this point that I started taking cabs most places. I’d taken cabs to dinner Friday and Saturday nights, relying on my feet and the sadly inadequate subway system during the day, but the constant walking was beginning to break down my feet and joints. Roman cabs are odd; you don’t hail them in the street like in NY, you either get one at a designated taxi stand or call them ahead of time (which is very handy when the hotel concierge does it for you, but they start the meter running when you call, so that when they show up, you’re already a couple Euros in the hole). Also Roman drivers feel very much like home—like NY cabbies, Roman cabbies seem to be engaged in a very big and ongoing game of chicken. No lane divisions, no turn signals, certainly NO SIGNS—and there are no crosswalk lights. If you want to cross the street, you just step into the middle of it and trust that all the cars will slow down long enough to let you pass. Amazingly, they do.

For lunch, I went to a mozzarella bar; which is just like a sushi bar, complete with Japanese-themed décor and music, but with mozzarella. And really good mozzarella, at that, with really good fresh tomatoes that actually tasted and looked like tomatoes—fresh, irregularly shaped, with color variations. None of these perfectly round, perfectly red, perfectly tasteless American supermarket tomatoes. I bought some primo Italian chocolates as gifts (one for Lia) and bought some Italian bandaids for my feet—which are actually better as they are made with cloth and not with plastic adhesive.

I wandered around the Colosseum some more and saw more ruins in a park just near there, then went to San Pietro in Vinculi (St. Peter’s in Chains)—a little church which features the actual chains of St. Peter in a little gilded box, and the unfinished tomb of Lorenzo di Medici by Michelangelo (featuring his Moses).

Dinner was at a tiny cute place in Campo di Fiori called Ditirambo. Like a little country kitchen, it had rough-hewn rafters and red checked tablecloths (but also had Tears for Fears—in English—playing in the background, which was a weird dichotomy, to say the least). I had a stack of fried eggplant which had tiny whole baby squid scattered all over the plate. For a moment it looked my stack of fried eggplant had big white bugs crawling over it, but they were good bugs. The squid were cooked but tender—they must have been placed in the same frying pan as the eggplant for just a minute before being added.

The next course was two huge handmade pumpkin ravioli, each as big as my hand, and filled with nothing but fresh pumpkin and just a little cheese, in a sauce that was just butter, a little bit of cheese, and sage. Yum. There was a little cinnamon/nutmeg cookie thing crumbled over it. A cheese plate and a nice bottle of Valpolicella rounded off the evening.

Tuesday
Tuesday was the last day, and so a day filled with bits and pieces. I started at what’s left of the Circus Maximus, then went to the Keats-Shelley House right beside the Spanish Steps, where they both lived before Keats died. How 25-year-olds dying of consumption get such great real estate is beyond me. Then I headed to the Galleria Borghese, my favorite of all the museums I saw in Rome. Housed in the former Borgia estate, set in a large park (again part of the former Borgia estate), it’s filled with art but is just the right size. A lot of sculpture, a lot of Bernini, a lot of old masters. The zoo was just next door so I wandered around the zoo for a bit. Monkeys are the same in any language.

For lunch I went back to Cavour 313 and had the wild boar platter (proscuitto, two kinds of salami), bruschetta covered with thick warm slices of lard, and super-fresh bufalo mozzarella with bresaola (air-cured beef sliced very thin) and the smallest, most delicate, most yummy piece of ricotta, with three glasses of Valpolicella. Next to La Pergola, this was my favorite meal. Guess why.

I wrapped up my shopping, began the packing process, and then took the streetcar out to the ‘burbs for dinner with Lia and her family that evening. Again, super-nice. Lots of wine, lots of cheese, lots of home cooking. I produced chocolates for dessert, and Lia gave me the rest of the bufalo mozzarella to take home with me. Amazingly, despite having a half-gallon bag full of cheese swimming in liquid in my purse, no one at the airport stopped me.

The trip home was completely uneventful, and I’m now busily eating away at the proscuitto, cheese and salt I brought home with me. I got several Italian cookbooks as inspiration, and fortunately I live in the Little Italy of Brooklyn—it shouldn’t be difficult to track down more wild boar salami and (albeit pasteurized) bufalo mozzarella.

Rome was magnifica, perfetto. I love travel, I love traveling by myself, I love eating, I love drinking. Even with the gruesome exchange rate, it was worth every penny.

Admittedly, it was nice to come home and be able to speak English without apologizing.

You can see the pics here, after the Buenos Aires pics.