A group of guys who hang out at one of the great hills of Rome (the Capitoline Hill
otherwise known as the Campidoglio) befriend (read: pick up) my friends and I. We're
naive and we're lucky. They happen to be a great group of guys.
We're staying at a nearby pensione, dining on bland pensione food. Massimo, Angelo, Maurizio, and Maurizio Biondo (the blond Maurizio) introduce us to alternatives. Maurizio shows us the little trattoria around the corner: tables covered in white paper, Frascati wine drunk out of small water glasses, and the specialty: spaghetti carbonara. We faint, we die, we love it. Maurizio Biondo takes us to a hostaria (buried in an out-of-the-way residential neighborhood I could never find again) that specializes in seafood. We eat platefuls of mixed shellfish -tiny, tiny shellfish, one needs a toothpick to extract the meat from a variety of small sculptures (called shells), and tasting like little morsels from heaven.
Angelo takes us on a Roman tour. He shows us his favorite site on the Aventino hill where there is an enclosed resplendent garden. When you look through the keyhole of its door, you see the dome of St. Peter's perfectly framed in keyhole and leaves.
Massimo brings us home to his parents' apartment in EUR (the modern community built by Mussolini just outside of Rome's center.) He makes us lunch -- spaghetti carbonara (what else? Rome's favorite dish). I watch closely as he creates. He's chatting in English, he's chatting in Italian, cooking is second nature.
I move into the apartment of Grazia. It's in Trastevere, Rome's oldest and most
funky neighborhood. Grazia is an unusual Roman. She left home at seventeen to live
on her own (while most young people live with their parents until married -- even
when divorced, they move back home). Her family practically disowned her. She is an
artist, I swear she's a seer.
I'm thrilled to have a kitchen to work in. One's tongue hangs out passing all the great food stores in Rome. The macelleria (meat market), salumeria (pork-butcher), polleria (chicken shop), and drogheria (grocery store), the outdoor markets (mercati) where a profusion of colorful, fresh, eye-soothing produce is offered: zucchini (young, slim, bright green), fiore di zucchini (zucchini flowers), carciofi (artichokes, slim, green-purple, on the stem), finnochio (fennel), fresh fava beans, red and green tomatoes, all colors of peppers, salad greens of unknown yet tempting varieties, and plentiful grapes, oranges (red inside), lemons, and, of course, more.
