Lunch on the Terrace

Me and my colleagues worked without pause the beginning of this week. On Wednesday a group of us rewarded ourselves with lunch on the terrace of my friend’s lovely apartment in Monteverde. The sun was shining, it was in the 60s, and the meal didn’t end until almost 4. On the menu: quenelles, bread, mortadella, prosciutto, arugula, mozzarella, eggs, peanut butter, nutella, clementines, and wine. This is what every day should be like in Rome.

The days are slipping away from me. I leave for work, I return from work, I do side jobs, I call my family and then suddenly it’s Sunday and I realize I have neglected to blog/photograph/visit the Caravaggio-Bacon exhibit/do every other small pleasure I mean to do weekly. Hopefully after the insanity that is the Summit this week my life will calm down and I can settle into my favorite routines.

I’m getting to know my neighborhood better with each passing day. I live in the center of Rome but not the historic center, a largely residential neighborhood where you don’t hear English spoken and a glass of wine costs 2.50 Euros. On the corner is a little bar owned by a nice Albanian named Roberto. He’s lived in Italy for 13 years, has 3 children, can speak fluent Russian and knows how to fly a helicopter. I’ve learned all of this when I stop in on my way home from work. By now Roberto has noticed that I don’t eat the spicy bruschette and brings me extra tomato and basil ones instead. We have a good relationship.

The results of Monday's strudel-making lesson, courtesy of an Austrian colleague.

 So I spent the past week learning to make strudel, struggling to not fall behind in work, and preparing for two major conferences. I’m now just finishing up my work at the second conference and life should settle down. I have a weekend getaway planned for the end of November and a day-trip to Napoli on the horizon. In the next few days I’m heading to one of Rome’s most famous coffee places. But tonight after the end of all this mayhem, I’m just going to enjoy a quiet glass of wine with Roberto and then a good night’s sleep.

It’s Sunday night and another work week begins all too soon. Rome weather has been schizophrenic lately, alternating thundershowers and sun multiple times each day. When combined with the equally inconsistent public transportation system, this has amounted to a weekend with a lot of standing in the rain for Madeline. Luckily I have an umbrella.

I spent most of this weekend in the Roman neighborhood of Testaccio. South of the city on the East bank of the Tiber, Testaccio is a fun, young neighborhood with a string of good nightclubs along one of its hills. It has fewer tourists and American students than nearby Trastevere and consequently costs a bit less.

Friday night began with an aperitivo with a colleague at L’Oasi della Birra, then dinner at Acqua e Farina with a friend. The aperitivo at L’Oasi was an insanely extensive buffet – stuffed and marinated vegetables, 2 kinds of quiche, 5 kinds of cured meat, several cheeses, rice salads, pasta salads, etc. It’s a relaxed place with a basement that has cozy tables ideal for aperitivos more romantic than mine (my colleague is very cute but married and female so the atmosphere was a bit wasted on us). After so much indulgence I wasn’t able to stomach an entire pizza. Luckily, Acqua e Farina is an Italian chain that specializes in smaller nibbles and I was able to have just one 3 inch pizza rossa, super-thin crust pizza slathered with marinara sauce, while my friend ate several pizzas and some kind of incredible folded crepe thing enclosing cheese, ham and eggplant. Da Remo still wins my award for best pizza in Testaccio but Acqua e Farina has much less of a wait on Friday nights.

Pizzetta from Acqua e Farina

Saturday night saw me at Caruso – a Latin dance club – for the first time. It was another colleague’s birthday celebration and a lovely night. The crowd was international with tons of men who could actually dance (and lacked the usual hordes of Italian men scanning the dance floor for foreign girls lacking in sobreity and judgment). Ladies have an opportunity to get up on stage and shake it to reggaeton. It will go unstated whether or not this opportunity was seized by my colleagues and I.

Today I joined forces with my flatmates in cleaning our apartment, did some grocery shopping and studied French and Spanish verbs. Now I’m researching the history of tiramisu for a writing project (interesting side note: tiramisu is much younger than you would think) before a friend takes me to dinner at one of the restaurants in my neighborhood. Report to follow…..

L’Oasi della Birra - Website currently under construction. Open daily 19:00-00:30. Piazza Testaccio, 41. Tel. +39 06 5746122. To reach with public transportation take tram 3, buses 23, 30, 75, 95, 170, 280, 716, or the metro line B to Piramide.

Acqua e Farina – Open daily 12:30-2:30 and 19:30-23:30. Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 2. Tel. +39 06 574 1382

Caruso Cafe – Via di Monte Testaccio, 36. Tel. +39 06 5745019. Open until 3:30 AM Tues-Thurs and Sunday, until 4:30 AM Friday and Saturday. Closed Monday. Dress is “trendy casual” – most girls are wearing either jeans and a cute top or a small dress, guys in typical club attire.

So because I am a completely logical and rational person, I have decided it is absolutely necessary that I re-learn Spanish. This would probably make more sense if I were in a place where people around me were actually speaking Spanish. Like Spain. Or Buenos Aires. Or the United States.

Learning Spanish when surrounded by Italian is hard. So I found a language exchange buddy. Because I am a very lucky girl, my new friend is not only nice but also likes to escape Rome during the weekends and has lived here long enough to discover some nice places.

Google Map of Gaeta

Saturday we took a train and a bus and ended up in Gaeta. A small town perched on a peninsula south of Rome there’s nothing truly spectacular about Gaeta. But it’s a charming seaside town and now that the summer tourists have gone, incredibly peaceful. We walked around the port while I butchered Spanish and then had incredible vermicelli with seafood marinara while he (much more skillfully) spoke English.

At the end of the day we sat on the beach and watched the sun set. I heard stories about Colombia and told my own about the States. We stayed just long enough to see the sun set before catching a bus back to Formia and a train to Rome.

Trains from Rome to Formia run frequently. The Regional takes around two hours and costs about 7 Euros while the Intercity is closer to one hour and costs 13 Euros. Either way, plan for the train to be running late. Buses from Formia to Gaeta cost 1 Euro, you can buy tickets at the bar inside the train station.

If you have lunch in Gaeta, an excellent place with reasonable prices is La Taverna del Marinaio (Via faustina, 36. Tel. 0771.461342) The house white wine is quite good and the seafood pastas are phenomenal.

It’s been over a month since I arrived in Rome. In stark contrast to my last time in Italy, I haven’t been traveling at all. In the entirety of this time the furthest I had been out of Rome was to go to dinner in Castel Gandalfo twenty minutes away.

I didn’t realize until this weekend how claustrophobic I was feeling. Sunday, in spite of the fact that I had work to do for both of my jobs, I allowed two friends to kidnap me for a day trip. We not only left Rome, we left the entire region of Lazio. True, we only drove one hour but that’s one of the beautiful things about Italy. One hundred kilometers and you can go from weaving through busloads of waddling tourists to this:

We drove east until we came to Abruzzo. I’ve been to Abruzzo a number of times but on the other end, near the Le Marche border. There Abruzzo is pastoral - hills of vineyards and grazing sheep in the interior and sunny seaside towns. The Abruzzo-Lazio border doesn’t have hills, it has mountains. Gran Sasso is the highest peak of the Appennines and right now, during the pre-skiing season, it’s empty.

On the recommendation of Marco’s father we drove to Campo Felice, a small town. Parts of the mountains were so high that they were rockface devoid of vegetation, a strange, alien landscape that one of my friends called “lunare.” On the altopiano we saw cows, donkeys, and wild horses. No human beings. It was surreal and a welcome break from the jostling chaos that is life in Rome (I think I can count only one day since my arrival that I have not been pushed, yelled at, or patted on the cheek by a stranger in the street. This is a city that reaches out and interacts with you. Literally.)

After a few hours of Safari Abruzzo, during which I, enraptured, photographed cows (I have a thing about livestock) and the boys complained about the wind messing up their hair, we decided it was time for lunch. I adore Sundays in Italy because they’re basically an excuse to have a decadent multi-course meal before napping the afternoon away. We found a little trattoria in the nearby town – if a settlement consisting of two streets can be called as such – and waited for a table near the fireplace.

Three courses of cured meats, cheeses, tripe, grilled vegetables, ravioli, gnocchi, sausages and arrosticini later we were stuffed. We drove back to Campo Felice and read the newspaper before packing up to head back to the city. We hit traffic returning to Rome and spent two hours driving 20 kilometers. I already missed the cows.

 

The terrace at Pagnanelli

I like terraces. I like delicious food.  Combine the two, throw in a view of a volcanic lake and you have one happy Madeline. That’s what happened last Saturday when I went to dinner at Antico Ristorante Pagnanelli dal 1882  in Castel Gandolfo.

Castel Gandolfo is a tiny town about 25 minutes outside Rome, on the edge of Lago Albano.  It’s probably best known for being the summer residence of the pope. And as one friend said, “Il papa non sopporta le cose brutte.” (The pope doesn’t stand for ugly things.) As the name suggests,  Pagnanelli has been around since 1882.  A large, multi-level terrace wraps around the lake with a view that is lovely at night and lovelier during the day.

I went with an old friend who had chosen the restaurant especially, knowing that I love creative Italian cuisine. It’s not hard to find very good, very traditional food in Italy. But to find chefs working with classic, top-quality ingredients in unexpected ways is a rarer delight. Pagnanelli is not cheap (I would even say it’s edging into the territory of over-priced) but it’s an experience worth having at least once.

Antipasto of strudel with smoked salmon, eggplant, and mozzarella

We started with a “strudel” with eggplant, smoked fish and mozzarella. I was skeptical of the description but when it arrived my hopes rose.  It was like no Viennese or German strudel I had ever seen, but instead a small baguette-shaped log with a dubious-looking brownish paste on top. There’s a special place in my heart for ugly food and I find that when expensive, fancy restaurants serve a less-than-beautiful dish, it’s usually quite tasty. This dish supported my theory: the perfect mix of rich, salty salmon and delicately seasoned pureed eggplant (the suspicious goo). A couple at the next table ordered a more aesthetically pleasing appetizer of raw oysters that they then proceeded to feed each other in a manner that made me glad there were no children around.  The rest of the dinner was delicious – light, fluffy ravioli on a bed of zucchini flowers. But the best part was the finish…

Stairs to the cantina

Paganelli has an immense cantina and if you request you can have aperitivo (pre-dinner drinks), dessert, or even the whole dinner amidst their thousands of bottles of wine. For a price, of course. We chose to have just dessert and our waitress sent us through a hidden door down curving stone stairs. We leisurely wandered around the cellars, digesting and  looking at the bottles before choosing a table. When we sat a waiter came with a Sicilian accent so thick that even I could perceive it and my northern Italian friend’s nose visibly wrinkled. He overcame his prejudices enough to order the waiter’s recommendation, a white chocolate semifreddo, while I went for tiramisu. It was the least inventive item on the menu, a scrumptious combination of coffee-soaked ladyfingers, mascarpone, and cocoa. It reminded me that some things are classics for a reason.

Wall of corkscrews at Pagnanelli

Antico Ristorante Pagnanelli dal 1882: www.pagnanelli.it (site also in English)

Via Antonio Gramsci, 4. Castel Gandolfo (RM) 00040

Tel: +39. 06.936.0004 OR +39.06.936.1740 Fax: +39.06.930.2187

Prices are high but good for a special occassion. They also host events and do cooking, wine and cheese classes. 

I’ve now been here a bit over a week and am starting to get my bearings. I passed Saturday in the historic center, seeing all of the sights I neglected to see when doing interviews over the summer. Here are a few pictures from the first days:

Normally I'm not a huge fan of tagging but I thought this anniversary present was kind of sweet.

 

Seat of Italy's highest court, viewed from the Tevere on a Sunday afternoon.

 

Somehow a cat sipping out of a bidet seems classier than when my beagle drinks from the toilet.

 

The view every morning when I walk to work.

In the past 15 days I have:

1. Wrangled with bureaucracy to get a visa, which came in the mail at 930 am on the morning when I had to leave for the airport by 11 am.

2. Flown across the Atlantic.

3. Moved back to Italy, albeit this time further south.

4. Started my new job.

5. Had yummy Italian pizza, good Italian coffee, and even a gelato or two.

6. As of 1 hour ago, found an apartment.

And I didn’t blog any of it. I’m going to blame it on the lack of internet and the chaos of finding a paying job/apartment/social life. Luckily my new place, which I move into on Sunday, will have wireless and from that point on I’ll be writing regularly about wine, food and life in the Eternal City.

These three pictures together give a feel of what Asheville is like.

This workshop will be held at "Sanctuary in the Pines"

Outside Fresh Market in North Asheville.

"I am not from here or there, my land is n Heaven."

My posts have been a bit slow as of late, mostly because I was in and out of town for job interviews and preparing to leave Bologna (cleaning apartment, packing boxes, packing suitcases for the States, saying goodbyes). I flew into Dulles late last night and will be in the U.S. for about a month. It feels strange.

While in the States I’ll still be posting in real time on my travels, meals, etc. I’ll be based in Virginia and North Carolina with side trips to D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and (maybe, just maybe) Louisiana. I’ll also be putting up a few posts on Bologna and Italy that I have back-logged. When I return to Italy, it will be to Rome. My few personal belongings have already been transplanted and I’m scanning sites for an apartment in the south-center of the city.

I’m not sure how I feel about Rome. In spite of the grafitti, the punkabestie, the gray Seattle-esque winter, I loved all 11 months of my time in Emilia-Romagna. Bologna treated me well and I’m sorry to leave behind the land of tortellini.

And Rome… Rome is… chaos. All of my Italian friends love Rome. They’re appalled that I prefer Milan. It’s not that I don’t like Rome. It’s beautiful and full of interesting people doing interesting things. But it’s a mess. You know what happened to me the last time I was in Rome? I was returning from my final job interview, melting in a suit on the un-airconditioned bus. A man standing near me -whom I did not know and had not spoken with – leaned over, caught a drop of sweat rolling down my neck with his finger, and THEN LICKED HIS FINGER. Who does that? What kind of city is home to people who do such disturbing things?

But I’m thrilled about my job and I’m happy for a new adventure. In a city with gorgeous ruins and world-class museums. A city with glamour. At Heathrow I met a cute Florentine couple flying to Dubai for their holiday. They asked me where I lived in Italy and for the first time I heard “Vivo a Roma” come from my mouth. I have to admit, it sounded good.