Lax Romana
Viaggio
Listen, Boeing, it may be a “dreamliner” up in the cozy, business class cubbies, where each traveler is comfortably ensconced in a cushy, capitalism-encrusted chrysalis in which raw currency converts to a memory foam cot in a cocktail bar, but back here in steerage, it’s clear your impressively aggressive ergonomics are not based on, you know, humans. Expansive entertainment options, though. #dreamlinerstories
Benvenuto
The driver from the airport asks if it’s the first visit to Rome. Yes for Katherine, no for me. “But it’s been many years since I’ve been,” I say.
“It hasn’t changed,” he says. “Everything that is wonderful will still be wonderful and everything that is terrible will still be terrible.”
AirBNB
The driver is taking us to our Trastevere AirBNB. He says, “like all true Romans” he was born in Trastevere. Now he lives in Ostiense because who can afford to live in Trastevere? I ask him if AirBNB and short-term rentals are the problem–taking up properties that locals would otherwise live in. Of course not, he says, happy to be employed shuttling tourists around to their short-term rentals. The only real problem, in his opinion, is the crappy quality of AirBNB listings which mislead the poor travelers.
Also, he says, just as the locals move to outlying areas, so to do the truly good restaurants, so good luck eating well, at least for a reasonable price. Is he smiling?
At the AirBNB, the bedroom lights are LEDs with an overcurrent in the circuit causing them to blink every few seconds, even after they are turned off. We cover them with cardboard and tape in order to sleep.
Buon Natale
After the bars close on Christmas Day, dozens of people filled with “holiday cheer” manage to materialize on the street below the bedroom window and spontaneously join in a raucous round of enthusiastic Yule screaming. I am impressed to discover they are in possession of drums.
Fuso orario
We wake up late. Truly, unabashedly late. We wander, confused by time and the miracle of flight, through a beautiful and disheveled city before settling on the Argentinean restaurant, Baires. Eating Argentinean makes no sense–it's a stubborn refutation of the historically sound "when in Rome" principle–but it’s an itch I need to scratch. We awkwardly attempt to justify a request for cappuccini in the afternoon hours because we slept in, based on the preciously bougie idea that a sweet and milky coffee drink after breakfast is an insulting abomination to Italians. The waiter sincerely does not fucking care. We have steak for breakfast.
Amici
We arrange to see friends who are coincidentally visiting Rome at the same time. We meet at the cafe at the Chiostro del Bramante, a cloister designed by Donato Bramante, a talented Renaissance architect who hated Michelangelo. The cloister is now a museum of sorts, currently hosting an exhibition called “Enjoy: Art meets Amusement,” curated by Danilo Eccher. A previous exhibition by the same curator was “Love. Contemporary Art meets Amour.” Someone clearly needs to stop this man.
The four of us drink Sangiovese, which is delivered with olives and potato chips. Our friends recently decamped from Santa Fe for the more urban and active pastures of Los Angeles. We arrive at complete agreement on the most likely explanation for the universe and the human condition within it being the result of a being a vast, complex, and somewhat glitchy simulation.
Ai Marmi
There is a line out the door at this joint specializing in pizza, cod fillets, and rice balls. We wait surrounded by Italians, who are impossibly excited to be in such proximity to each other and, what’s more, able to talk. I cannot overstate their total commitment to unflagging conversation. You would lose money betting on when a moment of contemplative silence might fall. That moment will never arrive.
I can’t believe Stoicism was practiced here as recently as the 3rd Century AD.
The pizze are thin and round and the dough is remarkable. A uniformly crisp exterior with a forgiving, chewy center. Seriously glitzy gluten structure. Perfectly cooked and no oil used to pregame the browning of the crust.
Also, those rice balls: A crisp, evenly browned crust cracks clean to reveal steaming, sumptuous rice teased with mozzarella. It’s like an onigiri meteor landed in a cheese ‘n’ tomato volcano and the whole thing toppled over into a sea of fry oil. Locals allegedly call this place the “obitorio” (mortuary) because of the long marble slabs pizze are rolled out on.
Il Pantheon
It is raining heavily with the kind of dedication necessary to freshen the slate of Rome’s winter streets and for swelling waters to rise and worry at the banks of the Tevere. Improbably, the rain grows to a deluge bordering on a slushy hail as we approach the Pantheon.
The Pantheon is a triumph of Roman concrete, a dome more than 140 feet across at its base, rising to an oculus open to the sky at the peak. I recall that it’s magnificent to be there when a ray of heavenly light falls into the space, illuminating the interior just so. But the dial-to-11-downpour streaming through the central hatch feels much more in line with what must be the current prevailing mood of the gods.
This is the kind of nervous beauty that brings white noise rushing to the ears.
My thighs are sopping wet through my soaked jeans and my shoes squelch like an accident with a microphone on the marble inlay floors, but my soul is in full ecstatic detonation.
Trattoria Da Danilo
After an amuse bouche of Michelangelo’s Moses with horns and an alarmingly sensuous and finger-plucking beard (horns either because Hebrew translation can be trickier than you think or because Michelangelo sensed, in the future, someone–goddamnitall– would need to yank Freud’s chain), we squeeze into lunch at Trattoria da Danilo without a reservation. This feels lucky since a bitter army of disgruntled Yelpers claims this is impossible.
The only other diners are Romans–workers, families, and a couple of conspicuously awkward couples–coworkers or? Father and daughter or?
A burrata with fried artichoke is just the right amount of soft cream in graceful combat with salty tang. We follow up with a strozzapreti al lardo con Pecorino di fossa. This is a thick, simple pasta with a tomato sauce made rich and wandering by lardo and softened with a mild sheep’s cheese aged in a pocket of volcanic stone. Even better is a fussilloni di Gragnano con pistacchi di Bronte e guanciale. The fussilloni from the Amalfi Coast pasta capital is fusilli’s big brother, each piece the size of a thumb. How someone manages a completely even al dente cooking of such a beast is beyond my hydronic capacity, but the consistency is flawless. They’re bathed in a kind of cream sauce kept from going astray by crushed Sicilian pistachios and thick slivers of pork cheek. It is befuddlingly tasty.
We wash it all down with a bottle of Valpolicella Ripasso. Because.
Notte
It is one hundred and fifty steps from our apartment’s street entrance to the banks of the Tevere. As I settle toward sleep in the top floor bedroom, the wide, persistent flow pulls at me with seductive, murky gravity. I want to unmoor, to be set loose. Not to drift aimless, but to conspire with something so relentless and undeterrable.
Rovine
I would have hated Roman architecture in its day–too bright, too colorfully painted, too ornamented and ostentatious. But the ruined remains, the determined structural persistence in the face of aggressive, often-abetted entropy makes me swoon. Especially when it’s braced, splinted, and scabbed together. Music is the only other force that comes close to extracting the same intoxicating elevation of spirit and the same lost, meandering melancholy.
Pianostrada
A Roman restaurant rarity in the sense that vegetables are often primary components of dishes as opposed to a specific category of side dish, Pianostrada calls itself a culinary laboratory. It’s also rare in the sense that it’s a restaurant conceived and operated by women as the restaurateurs and chefs. The menu dares to be inventive, the execution and plating are lovely, the food is the kind that lingers in the memory. The clientele is largely from the neighborhood. We stumble onto the folks renting our apartment to us and they do a double take: “How did you hear about his place?”
The wine list operates like a Pantone color book, which is fun but also disastrously unwieldy.
“Street Food”
Any urban center is going to have a very long history of authentic street food at this point, but the adoption of the English language moniker “street food” has spread across Rome like a virus. Many restaurants are either literally named “street food” or some close, punny variant as a promise to deliver all the magic and mystery promised by this elusive creature. One favorite version was the conflagration of “High Street”–the British term for a main street, especially one filled with posh shops–and “street food” into “High Street Food.” Why not? When you consider how appealing street food is to people who are, in fact, high–well. In Rome, it’s not only the pizze and panini being hawked as street food, but the international explosion in hamburger fever and the very Roman tradition of all manner of “frittati”–especially suppli or fried rice balls.
Supplizio is chef Arcangelo Dandini’s side-hustle in manifesting a hipster street food joint to capitalize on the marriage of his good name with a trend only eclipsed by cursed American hamburgers. Suppli are a bit like a Sicilian Arancini if that strikes a taste bud. Supplizio is tiny, craftily designed, and feels like discovering a local hole-in-the-wall. Of course, the only other people here are also tourists. The inventive suppli are hot, delicious and populated with enough creative ingredients to get a raised eyebrow from David Chang, but not quite up to Ai Marmi’s molten glory.
Graffiti
A popular Roman pastime for millenia, graffiti has really gone big in recent years. On the plus side, Rome is one of the epicenters of a rollicking European street art scene that encompasses everything from fully muralized buildings and ingeniously intricate wheat pastings to texty witticisms and clever graphic asides. On the negative end, it’s a breeding ground for the discontented–both righteously and otherwise–to proliferate perturbingly sloppy tagging that bastes the ancient city in mindless vandalism.
Patate
I am not sure Romans know how to cook potatoes. To clarify: they certainly are able to cook them with proficiency to a satisfactory doneness. And they also are able make wonderful things with potato as a base–ciao gnocchi!–but there is no sense of art or passion in the preparation of potatoes as their simple selves. It feels as if potatoes are only offered because American and British travelers expect them. We never went out of our way to order them, but potatoes were frequently served nonetheless. On one occasion, Katherine said: “These potatoes were not cooked with love. Worse, they were cooked with obligation.”
Full disclosure: I am unreasonably passionate about potatoes.
Piramide Cestia
Roughly between the graves of Shelley and Keats in the Cimitero Acattolico, where non-Catholics are buried, is a tall, skinny pyramid. The Nubian proportions are decidedly un-Egyptian, but the pyramid is quite beautiful–a quiet and haunting presence that sits both within the cemetery and outside of it, being built exactly upon the ancient wall that rings the gravestones. It was built, if I understand correctly, at the direction of a wealthy regional magistrate to be a memorial to himself. And built after the enactment of a law banning ostentatious displays of wealth in monuments. So this would be the dialed down version.
The area around the pyramid is a nice place to sit, with a weighty mass to meditate upon. Better still, the cemetery is home to a clowder of cats–tiny tigers and panthers that prowl from headstone to vault. They are fed, housed and cared for by a small group of volunteers dedicated to “Il gatti di Piramide.”
Also, nearby, there is an actual mountain–or at least a significant hill–that rose from roughly 300 years of discarded clay vessels. Single use amphorae, if you can believe it, centuries before plastic water bottles were even conceivable.
Musei Capitolini Centrale Montemartini
More museums should smell of motor oil. Do not skip this museum.
Eataly Roma
A friend living in Rome described this recently global gourmet behemoth as “basically Whole Foods” which of course is now “basically Amazon.” But this Italian-themed grocery/upscale food court is grander and weirder than that. And going to Eataly in Italy is precariously meta, and therefore mandatory.
Personally, it feels like a tangible tragedy to reproduce what still clings to life in the actual streets of Rome–small specialty stores selling cheese or bread or wine or pastries or pastas–with a singularly branded galleria of indulgent accessibility. Plus, how can you sell such Italian fetishization to actual Italians? Apparently, you can, even with such a goofball name.
Still, I bet you can’t get two liters of bulk Sangiovese for less than $10 at Eataly in the US. Or anywhere else in the US.
Metamorfosi
I don’t always eat at Michelin-starred restaurants, but when I do, they usually don’t have the curious combination of perfection and playfulness present in the cooking at Metamorfosi.
This place strips the veneer of pretentious douchebaggery from contemporary culinary techniques by serving dishes that are as relentlessly delightful in concept as they are in execution. This is a crew of serious food dorks. I mean, genuine gastronomy nerds. They are not even pretending to be cool. And, lordy, are they good at what they’re doing.
The six-course tasting menu is well-portioned and the wine pairings are unexpected, educational and supernaturally savvy. This one easily gets an indelible ink check box in the top 5 meals of my life. Also, I was turned on to Timorasso and my wine life will never be the same.
Anno Nuovo
A friend from New Mexico who now lives in Rome invites us to enjoy a New Year’s celebration at his home with his family and some friends. They live just on the edge of a feasible walking distance from our location and we spend a charming afternoon following one of the city’s ancient walls out toward their house. We’ll take a cab back to the city center later.
Here’s what I learned:
- A party of art historians and introverts with multiple different primary languages does not divert in too many ways from what you might expect.
- Both lentils and sausage are considered lucky New Year’s meals but New Mexico red chile seals the deal anywhere on earth.
- I don’t know enough about the origins of my own first name to satisfy a room full of academics.
- Every single Roman is in possession of fireworks at all times and is ready to use them at a moment’s notice.
- Europeans held a righteous anger when George W Bush was president of the United States and a cautious optimism through Barack Obama’s administration. Trump just plain scares them. So, same as us.
- It’s quite unexpectedly comforting to be taken in as a guest for one of the more significant shared human rituals. Thanks, Antonio!
- Do not plan to take a cab anywhere in Rome late on New Year’s Eve...
MyTaxi
Rome’s public transport puts most American cities to shame, but it’s not quite as comprehensive as many European capitals. Lyft doesn’t operate here and Uber only runs its “black car” service in accordance with local taxi laws. MyTaxi is an app that’s meant to make using traditional taxis as easy as Lyft or Uber. We walked most places but used Mytaxi just enough to learn that it’s more of a defense against disruption rather than a competitor to ride services. It turns out Roman taxi drivers just ignore MyTaxi when it’s convenient for them. Leaving our New Year’s party and getting across Rome at 2 in the morning was just such a time. Our Roman party hostess knew this and suggested we simply stay at their place, but we took our chances. Calls for a ride with the app were met with stony silence–none of the cab drivers were accepting because of the app’s set fares. Uber was operating, but wanted more than 100 Euro for a short ride. Miraculously, we physically hailed a cab within 5 minutes. The driver was cruising with his girlfriend in the front seat with his service light off but swerved to the curb just to gauge our desperation. He floated a flat price about double what the fare would normally cost. Feeling like a sucker, but also feeling sleepy and knowing it was a fraction of the Uber rate, I agreed.
My guess is that well more than 100 people frantically tried to hail our cab as we logged a couple miles through the smoky, glittering remnants of New Year’s Eve. I felt a little less the sucker as we squeezed out of the mobbed taxi in Trastevere and began the long, slow press through hard partying bodies to reach our apartment door.
Salumeria Roscioli
Imagine the amazing delicatessen of your childhood or, failing that, your dreams. It’s that place where breads, flours, condiments, meats, cheeses, pickles, spices, etc, all of impeccable quality, are accessible in dizzying array. It’s packed from floor to ceiling with curious culinary accoutrements and the people who work the counters have a kind of outsized, iconic presence. Every visit is special, like a museum or a magic show. Now imagine that each night, after closing, that same deli stocks its aisles and floors with tables and it reopens as a restaurant, translating its impressive stock of raw ingredients into sublime, complete meals. This is a real place in Rome. We went twice for dinner and everyday of my life since, I wish we’d gone more.
L’Arcangelo
Local celebrity chef Arcangelo Dandini not only has a hell of a name, he’s got a hell of a restaurant. With a specialty in Roman and Lazio-region cuisine, many of his menu items are familiar by the time we arrive, but the preparation and flavor is distinct enough to understand how he’s earned his accolades. You might recall this is the same chef with a “street food” restaurant called Supplizio. If the hipster joint is a smidge disappointing, the original restaurant is a revelation. Playful decor and a friendly staff was just a cover for a kitchen crew forced at fork-point to churn out perfectly poised pasta, the most seratonin-supplying suppli yet, and classic Roman standbys like charred Jewish-style artichoke and hefty offal made piquant with well-proportioned pamperings of Pecorino.
Gelato
There can hardly be a more serious topic when visiting Italy. Where is the finest gelato? In Rome, it is Fatamorgana. I accept there are those who will assert that I am unqualified to make such an assertive assessment, but I rest on my standing as a dedicated gelato dilettante–I will never possess the knowledge to understand these dark and creamy arts, but I sure as hell know what I like and I’ve pounded down more than my fair share of Pistacchio. I follow basic rules, such as the more the Pistacchio looks like the horrible interior of a toddler’s messiest diaper, the tastier it’s going to be. Fatamorgana, though, is breaking all the rules and bringing inventive new flavors to an industry that’s been coasting on stracciatella for centuries. When I wanted the flavor based on black garlic, the stalwart staff tried their damndest to talk me out of it. No risky flavors for tourists! But after basically begging, I bagged the best ball of gelato of my life. The rest of the world hasn’t even learned to emulate standard gelato–what are we going to do now that the Italians are actually innovating?
Armando al Pantheon
When we visited the Pantheon in a downpour after first arriving, we tried to grab a table at this famous restaurant steps away from the legendary monument. They politely laughed in our faces. But we made a reservation then and there for the first available slot, a couple weeks out. When our day arrived, we smugly watched other hopeful eaters get turned away in droves just as we were that first, wet day. But the real satisfaction came in the meal. You might think eating expertly handcrafted pasta day after day would become tiresome, but you would be wrong. This was the place, finally, to have a classic Carbonara–the interplay between the velvety texture created by the egg stirred into pasta and the salty tang of the guanciale so familiar from so many attempts at home but still so mysteriously beyond reach when compared to what's delivered from such a masterful kitchen. The most powerful magic comes from the simplest spells. On the subject of simplicity, I actually preferred a spaghetti alla verde con rucola, limone e scaglie di parmigiano.
La Tavernaccia da Bruno
A self-effacing joint across the street from a McDonald’s franchise (Why?!) and across the river from Testaccio–where artist hipsters seem to be challenging gypsy gangsters for dominance–La Tavernaccia is a very much a working class, neighborhood restaurant and one that is exceptionally friendly to all comers. The menu draws from a number of Italian regions, rather than staying more Lazio-focused and our lunch was the definition of comfort food, but the definition one is spoiled by when one is eating out in Italy everyday. When Katherine wanted to finished her meal with a cappuccino, the server said “of course!” without hesitation. We then watched her run outside and across the street to borrow milk from another restaurant (not McDonald’s). That’s friendly service
Ostia Antica
Situated on the Mediterranean coast, south of the Fiumicino airport, Ostia Antica is a ruin that was once a thriving port city. It was situated where the Tivere met the sea and was thus the entry to Rome and an incredibly vibrant market city. It was populated with an ornate temple, a significant theater, multi-story high-density housing, and a market square where the services available in distinct stalls were represented by ornate mosaic graphics in the stone walkways. But sackings, politics, civil war and–significantly–a shift in the course of the Tiber that favored port operations in another location, led to the decline of Ostia. It was eventually covered in drifting river silt, which acted as something of a preservative allowing the ruins to survive long enough for us to trample them today. Now it's the lack of funding for preservation that is destroying these beautiful architectural remnants. It’s a reminder that for all our fervent attention on the politics, crises, and entertainments of the day, history will have its way with us both in predictable and surprising ways.
Il Ritorno
I try to avoid checking luggage because I feel the odds are always good it will be lost. In this case, the entire plane’s luggage was lost. Just, whoops. Didn’t get that one loaded back in Rome. The lost luggage counter in Chicago was, let's call it "unprepared" for an entire plane to arrive without luggage.
But I’d happily trade my luggage for another couple weeks in Rome.