Shopping again in Rome - a feast for the eyes

Part of the sweets counter at our favorite coffee bar/pasticceria (pastry shop) off Piazza Mazzini.
Do you believe all those jells and marzipan, not to mention the mini cakes?

My number came up at "Piccolo Forno" (which means "small oven" or
in essence a baked goods shop).

Back to shopping.  This time not signs, but sights - some of the ones that make us drool, make us buy, make us look, make us crazy.

In addition to the delectable-looking sweets above, we enjoyed scanning the many breads and other foods in this not-so-small Piccolo Forno (photo left), which had just about any kind of prepared food (stuffed tomatoes? pasta? salami?), along with breads and rolls. It attracted a crowd, as you can see.  We had to figure out how to take a number and wait our turn (not the easiest thing to do among Italians). Only about 1/3 of the counter space is shown in this photo.  The forno was in a large indoor public market.

Hoverboard shopper checking out at our local
(when we lived in the Salaria neighborhood)
small-sized Carrefour market. Notable and
customary - the cashier sits rather than stands;
you bag your own groceries; you pay for the bag
 (as now in New York and Los Angeles).
Re the customer - he's on a board that lights up.

Besides vistas of incredibly tasting looking offerings, there are strange sights, like the shopper at left on a "hoverboard."  In trying to figure out if this was even legal in Rome (it shouldn't be; we pedestrians need to survive), I learned that, although the vendors have gone out of business where we live in Los Angeles, the state of California allows these devices. And in London apparently one can buy them, but they are banned under the 1835 Highways Act, which states people cannot use the footway (sidewalk? marciapiedi?) to “lead or drive any horse, ass, sheep, mule, swine, or cattle or carriage of any description” which list apparently includes hoverboards.

One of the crowded aisles in a "casalinghi"
store.

We typically spread our food shopping among large (not in the US sense) markets, small markets, chains, family-run places, and mini markets (the last about which we've written before - many run by Egyptians and Bangladeshi). One of our go-to places for non-food items is the "casalinghi" or "housewares" store. In Rome, these are almost all run by Chinese immigrants, and carry very inexpensive (as well as pretty flimsy) goods of all types - think Dollar Stores (photo right).  The aisles are always crammed and narrow, and often you have to ask one of the store employees (who speak varying levels of Italian) where something is.  And someone in the store can find in a nook or cranny somewhere that child's potty chair, those hangers, or that candle. Bill and I still recall being in a casalinghi and asking for candles. The woman at the register yelled at the top of her lungs "candele!, candele!", and out popped another employee leading us to the candles "section" of the store.

And, finally (for this shopping installment), below is a sight from the Centro - the center of old Rome where there are still artisan shops. Here the proprietor is advertising and showing off his or her goods by hanging them outside, in front of the store, on an "Ape" truck (we've written about the "ape" - or "bee" truck previously - it sounds like a bee with its tiny motor and 3 wheels).

You might also note here the bicycle tucked into a parking space behind a scooter, and the Ape tucked into a space supposedly limited to scooter parking, taking up an area that would hold 4-6 scooters (when you drive a scooter
- and have to park it - you notice these things).

Dianne

Ariccia: For the Birds, and the Pigs

Ariccia may be our favorite town in the Colli Albani.  The entrance to it is simply spectacular: over
an elegant and long bridge, spanning a deep gorge, the city center just at the end, magnificent views of the coastal plain and the Mediterranean beyond.










The tranquil main square, with a bar and exterior seating, is the perfect place for a morning coffee.
Around the corner is "main street," narrow and inviting, shops and bars, locals sitting--and trimming green beans.











Then there's a whole "other" Ariccia, just through the town and down left: a spilling semicircle with perhaps a dozen restaurants and cafes, all featuring some version of pork, most with some sort of pig logo out front. (The bridge to the right of the photo on the right is the same one pictured in the older photo, below.)

Today, the restaurant area is to the right, and down.  View looking north/northwest.  

And trucks delivering Ariccia pig meat going by.

One time we chose Osteria del Borgo and pappardelle with...pork (wild boar)!  And a plateful of porchetta (photos above and left).  All pork all the time (we first wrote about Ariccia's porchetta in 2011).  On another visit we discovered a street of restaurants heading up the hill alongside the Parco dei Chigi.  Men and women hawking their restaurants even crossed the street to accost us.  Nonetheless, we chose one - Osteria da Angelo (da 1920, "hand made pasta" - those factors attracted us), and had a terrific porchetta "starter" followed by that pasta.  We've now discovered the difference between dry and moist porchetta.  You definitely want the latter.  And, you need to eat it with some of the crispy skin and fat for flavor.  Just do it.

Bernini's Church of the Assunta - he was inspired by the Pantheon dome, as he was reconstructing the Pantheon into a church.
The small fountain to the left in this picture is the Fontana delle Tre Cannelli (Fountain of the Three Spouts).  The fountain
also sports the Chigi symbols - the mounds topped by a star.

A tasty town, yes, but the most remarkable aspect of this small community is that it has two monumental buildings by the distinguished 17th-century architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini.  We think that's two more than any other town in the Colli Albani (but we could be wrong).  The Bernini buildings are on the central square, facing each other.  The entire square, with the palazzo on one side and the church on the other, was designed by Bernini for Chigi Pope Alexander VII, and that is one reason we were so impressed by the view of the town as we came over the bridge.  The bridge, a 19th-century addition to the town, was destroyed in World War II and rebuilt after.

View of "lower" Ariccia (the dome of Bernini's church is visible), part of the immense park, and, beyond, the Mediterranean.  The nets at the side of the bridge are there to catch would-be suicides.  

Across the street from the church, the long white building is Bernini's (and Carlo Fontana's--a Bernini pupil) Palazzo Savelli Chigi (photo of entrance above). The two rebuilt an earlier structure in baroque style in the 1660s.  The palazzo belonged to the

Chigi Pope Alexander VII (we think), eyed by Dianne.

Chigi family for more than 300 years, finally ceded to the Commune only in 1988.

It was a setting for the 1963 Luchino Visconti film, Il Gattopardo ("The Leopard"), starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon, and now hosts exhibitions and events.

From the terrace.

The rather plain facade belies a complex and rich decorated interior.  A balcony/deck overlooks the gorge and park below--what used to be Chigi property - and fascinating enough to us that Dianne is writing it up as a separate post (all Ariccia all the time!).

In the Palazzo Savelli Chigi, we especially enjoyed the "admissions" room, with a ceiling delightfully painted in birds--and an animal we couldn't identify, devouring a mouse.   So don't forget to look up!

Bill and Dianne

John Fante: an American writer in Rome, in the 1950s

Italian-American writer John Fante [1909, near Chieti - 1983] was in Rome in the summer of 1957, and again in 1960, on the latter occasion for a stint as a screenwriter with Italian film mogul Dino de Laurentiis.


Although his work was never broadly popular in the United States, at the time of his Rome trip he had written several novels that had been greeted with some measure of critical approval, including Wait Until Spring, Bandini [1938] and Ask the Dust [1938], as well as a well-received book of short stories, Dago Red [1940].  H.L. Mencken, the mercurial editor of the influential journal American Mercury, was a mentor, friend, and life-long correspondent, as was Carey McWilliams, author of Factories in the Field and Ill Fares the Land,
whose elegant, poetic prose and commitment to America's rural underclass was a feature of his widely admired books,


Fante lived most of his life in or around Los Angeles, and Hollywood was an ever-present temptation, especially for a writer whose novels didn't sell very well.  Yet he had always considered the screenplay inferior to the novel--and the short story--and despite dabbling for brief periods in screenwriting over the years, he had for the most part resisted the allure of the silver screen.  His reluctance diminished somewhat as he aged, and in the 1950s and 1960s he authored a number of screenplays, including Walk on the Wild Side [1962], from the Nelson Algren novel.  That one was actually made into a film.  His favorite novelists were Steinbeck, Hemingway, James T. Farrell and, among Italian writers, Ignazio Silone. 

Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay in 1957, the film Full of Life made Fante a valued Hollywood commodity, and its success was influential in getting him film work abroad, first in Naples and Rome in 1957, then in Paris, and finally in Rome in 1960.  His 1957 project was a script for a Columbia Pictures comedy, The Roses, set in Naples and to star Jack Lemmon.  On that trip, he reached Rome on July 27 and made his way to via Veneto's Hotel Excelsior, once the headquarters of the German occupation during the war.  That evening he wrote to his wife, Joyce: "I don't know what to say about Rome that might give a strong impression.  I have already seen it too much in films. I do like its free-bouncing atmosphere, the fact that now, at 2 in the morning the streets are filled with people walking slowly God knows where, and little Fiats whizzing along crazily at frightening speeds,  No headlights are allowed at night, just those dim little parking lights--no horns either, and I even doubt that there are special traffic laws.  You just do the best you can, in a car or walking." 

At home in Los Angeles

Via Veneto, he continued, "is jammed with tables and chairs, people sitting, talking, drinking.  There is a heavy inroad of tourists that somehow spoils the original vitality."  Fante had recently visited Copenhagen, and he comments in this letter about that city's cleanliness.  "I think if a loose piece of paper fell  into the street the mayor would lose his job....The Romans are not so clean, but they seem considerably more sophisticated.  Nobody really cares about anything in Rome--I gathered this right away." 


In August 1957, in another letter to Joyce, this one from Naples, he wrote that he had been informed that "I have quite a literary reputation in Italy, especially in Rome, that Wait Until Spring  has gone into a new edition there, and that people like Ask the Dust best of my books."  He had been interviewed by one of the Rome dailies.  These Rome contacts paid off.  Within a few years later he was at work in Rome on a De Laurentiis project: a script about Navarra, King of Naples. 

Fante, left, with Charles Bukowski, an admirer

He was staying on the Residence Palace Hotel, at via Archimede 69.  "Honey," he wrote to Joyce,   "everything is madness.  I hate this hotel and will be out soon.  I am rested now, but trip was beastly.  Imagine traveling in one plane with 130 Italians.  They scared hell out of me from the moment of departure in New York.  My God, how they wailed, wept, flung arms around friends and relatives down to see them off.  I got the awful feeling we were all doomed." 


Fante had dinner with the film's director, a man named Coletti.  "He is a pleasant, not profound man," wrote Fante.  "He drives one of the biggest cars in Rome--a white 1956 Olds 88 convertible.  Lots of streets are too small for it.  We went to the Coliseum at midnight in the moonlight and looked down upon it, and Coletti muttered a lot of clichés about all that blood, and the poor martyrs, etc.  It is a frightful hole."

"This is a lousy hotel," he went on.  "Nice, clean, etc, but full of fat Catholic broads all fired up about touring the Vatican.  Strictly American, but, naturally the management won't serve American coffee, though 95 percent of the guests are from the states."

"Maybe I'm not wildly enthusiastic about Rome but I do like it.  There is something here--people call it 'the color of Rome'--a gold-on-red tint implanted in buildings that gives it an almost suffocatingly beautiful aspect.  This, coupled with the constant presence of green in trees, shrubs, vines evokes some lovely sights, specially in a background of Roman ruins.  Certainly it is more beautiful than Paris--and now that I've said it, I'll say no more." 

By the middle of August he had settled into a room at via Rusticucci 14, only meters from the Vatican.  "Life in Rome so far has been a journey through the stomach," he wrote.  God, how we eat.  No denying I've gained weight...."  He and his son Nick, who had joined him, were enjoying the city's eateries.  "In this area of the Vatican there are dozens and dozens of small trattoria, or little cafes where the food is exquisite.  We plan to try them all out."
About a month later, he was critical of the fare:  "It is very hard to eat correctly here.  They will sneak oil into your food, and they can't understand how anyone can do without it and try to prove you wrong."  And "you have no idea of how often I find my coffee sweetened to the waiter's taste.  They just do it their way.  You have to stand guard over your soup like a cop, lest a waiter charge you and submerge the soup in cheese."

Fante found it hard to sleep.  "The place is terribly noisy everywhere and one must get used to it.  As for all that I have seen, I have not quite reacted to anything.  I get the odd feeling of walking through post-cards--a one dimensional contact with the past.  None of it moves me with any force.  But the sky is always exquisite, dazzling white clouds rolling past.  The nights are warm and eerily unreal, almost too perfect.  I would say this is a more beautiful city than Paris, but somehow it is not charged with the electricity of Paris.  It is useless to try and see everything.  I am told it is the job of the lifetime and I believe it." 

He was unimpressed by the Vatican.  "The ridiculous thing about the experience is that one walks away not particularly astonished.  It has been over-sold.  Whole armies of priests and nuns find it enormously delightful, but just plain culpable Christians failed to respond in kind."

Fante was never at a loss for words, and his letters home contain still more about Rome and Italy.  Here's a final excerpt:  "Incidentally, if you never hear more from me on this subject, blame the Italians.  They are simply not reliable.  They make dates, promises, avowals, and you never hear from them again.  It has happened to me often in my short stay here." 

Bill


[These excerpts are from John Fante, Selected Letters, 1931-1981, ed. Seamus Cooney [Harper Collins, 1991.]

Red Garlic from Sulmona--by the Cartload

a.m. cart is full

Every Roman street market--and there are more than a hundred--has its itinerant garlic peddlars, usually smallish guys who cruise the market, offering 3 bulbs for a Euro--okay if you need garlic. 
What I'd never seen, until one day at Piazza San Giovanni di Dio, was the sale of garlic from a cart.  The merchant, who had positioned himself just outside the market proper, where he couldn't be so easily accused of competing with those who had paid money to rent regular stalls, seemed to have found a niche in the market: red garlic from Sulmona (if the Italians don't know where it comes from, they won't buy it).  A bit of research revealed that red garlic is considered quite special: it comes only from the Sulmona basin and the Peligna Valley in the Abruzzo, and it's highly prized for its flavor (sweet, delicate, not bitter) and medicinal properties.  E3 per treccia (braid) or, ordered from the UK, L2.75 plus shipping.    Bill

early p.m. front of cart is empty

Eataly Opens Rome Store

Thursday, June 21: opening day at Rome’s Eataly.  Opening day, that is, for us ordinary folk; “i big” had their own opening a few days ago: the mayor was there, and the president of the province, and the president of the region, and the founder of the Italian Slow Food movement, Carlo Petrini, and legendary pop star Gino Paoli, among others.   The pols were there because they can’t resist a spectacle, and Rome’s Eataly, the largest of 19 Eataly’s store-restaurants around the world, is just that: 17 thousand square meters of space, encompassing 23 eating places, 40 areas devoted to teaching about food, 8 spaces where they make mozzarella or fresh pasta or bread, 14,000 products for sale, hundreds of employees, an anticipated 6 million visitors per year.  They were there, too, to celebrate a project brought to fruition entirely with private funds.  Slow Food’s Petrini waxed eloquent on that issue, suggesting that Eataly would be a “permanent Olympics” for the area, without costing the city a cent.

That’s mostly true, but not entirely.  The building that houses Eataly was constructed with public funds.  It opened in 1989/90 as the Air Terminal Ostiense, first to handle the traffic from the 1990 World Cup, then as the place that would connect tourists and others arriving at Rome’s far-away Fiumicino Airport with the city of Rome.  Designed by Spanish architect Julio Lafuente in the grand, open, monumental style of Penn Station (now defunct) by way of the Baths of Caracalla, the postmodern structure fell on bad times from the beginning.  Travelers had difficulty finding taxis, carting their luggage over (or under) the broad set of tracks to the regular railway station, or getting to the Metro; everything was close as the crow flies, but humans with luggage could only wish they had wings.   It was not long before the station was abandoned for the purposes of the Fiumicino trade, and for at least a decade it remained empty.   The more recent chronology is a bit murky: in 2009 and 2010 the Air Terminal was used, unofficially, to house homeless Afghani refugees; in the former year it was purchased by the financiers of Eataly.    (Air Terminal Ostiense gets a brief mention in Rome the Second Time (the book) at page 68.)

While the powerful and yet playful exterior of Lafuente’s Air Terminal remains as he designed it, little—indeed, nothing—remains of the interior.  The enormous, open halls of the original have been filled in, 3 floors added. 

The spectacle remains, but it is of a different sort than Lafuente had in mind: rather than the spectacle of wondrous space, we have the spectacle of the 21^st century department store, the spectacle of goods and services, of fashion and design, or products and packaging, of color and choice. 

This is the spectacle of the worldwide furnishing giant IKEA, of an engaging, accessible, and sensible capitalism, there to make money, yes, but also to bring us what we need, what is best for us. 

Eataly, of course, is all about food.  But not just any food, and not just any Italian food.  Eataly comes with a 9-point Manifesto (perhaps 10 would seem too contrived).  Among its points: food unites people across lines of social class; high quality food improves one’s general quality of life; consumers should know the story, the history, behind the foods they consume; and high quality foods should be available at affordable prices (indeed, a recent advertisement promises, “At Eataly high quality costs half.”)  There’s a lot of emphasis on the importance of “what we put inside our bodies,” as opposed to the things outside, and lots of talk about their “passion” for providing  people with good food and how vital it is that people be “passionate” about what they eat.  Substitute “home furnishings” for “food” and you’ve pretty much got IKEA. 

Coffee bar

Fruits and vegetables, not a priority

There’s lots to think about here.  We know there’s some truth in the claim that the tensions of social class can melt away in the pleasures of a good meal.  But one of Eataly’s markets is the very affluent consumer.  At least one of its fourth-floor restaurants caters to the very rich, and posters announce series of 12 wine-tastings for 500 Euro.  It’s hard to disagree with the idea that what we put in our bodies is important.  But one of Eataly’s many food outlets sells pizza and another specializes in “fritti”—that is, deep fried foods, shrimp, calamari and meatballs (delicious – we know, we tried them) and other treats—that are very Roman but would seem low on the nutritional scale.   Most of the wines sold at Eataly contain suphites.  There’s a huge section devoted to the fatty meats—ham, mortadella, sausage—that Italians devour.   And the fruits and vegetables department, where the produce is displayed under canvas tents designed to suggest an old-fashioned market, is tiny.   

Lots of choice

We can’t really speak to the issue of whether the food available at Eataly is of “high quality,” or of higher quality than one can get elsewhere in Rome (that, after all, would be a sensible standard).  Moreover, how would one prove such a claim?  Mayor Gianni Alemanno, the conservative ex-thug not known for his cultured sensibilities, had no such doubts.  Eataly, he announced, is “launching a model where one says no to consumerism, but yes to the quality of what one consumes.”    

Eataly's shopping carts and fashionably-dressed
shopper

We have one more concern, possibly the most significant for Rome, and it emerges directly from the Eataly’s advertising.  “Already,” says the company, “many Romans have taken to doing all their grocery shopping at Eataly” (hanno presso a fare la spesa completa da Eataly).  If we thought that say, half of Eataly’s sales would be to tourists and foreigners, that would be one thing.  But we found only one sign of any kind in English, the common language of Rome tourism; everything’s in Italian—a good indication that that’s the key market.  If most of those customers are Romans, we can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen to the local meat markets, salumerie (essentially delis), and neighborhood markets that are now just holding their own against a growing number of small, chain grocers.  At bottom, Eataly is just a “big box” store—an attractive and enticing one to be sure—ready, like all big-box stores everywhere, to destroy the little guys.  That’s what they do. 

Eataly as spectacle

That's our view--and we're stickin' to it.  But it's a long-term perspective.  In the short term, we're less critical, more positive.  We like IKEA, and we've shopped there with some success and been proud of our self-assembly skills.  We can't resist the spectacle, even if it's just capitalism at its shiny new best. 

Supervisor (left) and employees try to figure
out how to serve us our fritti.  Opening day
jitters

We enjoyed our visit, marveling at the hundreds of brands of olive oil, figuring out when things were open (the restaurants close, Italian style, from 3 to 7 pm), impressed by the on-site beer-making, digging into the philosophy of the place, observing the young employees learning their jobs and the system, surprised that one could purchase "sfuso" wine (from the barrel, at E2 per bottle), taken by the rich, complex, postmodern interior of the place, photographing the photographers photograping the spectacle.  Not a bad way to spend an afternoon. 

Bill



How the Air Terminal Ostiense interior should have looked

We point out that Eataly was in 8 other cities in Italy before coming to Rome, and that in addition to its highly successful New York City operation, it has 7, soon to be 9 locations in Tokyo. Coming soon: Chicago, Los Angeles. 

Some sense of Lafuente's volume remains



Peel me a Fig: Dinner with Friends

A lovely meal with friends.  We are embarrassed to say that this was our introduction to "coppiette," a rope-like strand of dried, spicy meat (akin to our beef jerky, though more tender and not packaged in plastic).  Here, chopped into small, bite-size pieces, the perfect complement to a glass of wine. 

The main course was a delicious "ruote" (wheels) pasta, the ingredients, including dried pachino tomatoes and capers, brought from Sicily. 

Figs--fresh and dried, for comparison and contrast--for dessert, along with a lesson in how to select a perfect, ripe fig: make sure the green "shirt" is "torn" (slightly open) and there's a small hole at the bottom.  Peel and eat.  As Jack Kerouac wrote of the apple pie he consumed at stops across the country, "it was delicious, and nutritious of course." 

For figs he might have added, "sensual."  On the sensuous fig, we have the testimony of D.H. Lawrence in his poem, "Figs."  "The vulgar way [to eat a fig]," he wrote, "is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite." 

"The fig is a very secretive fruit" [continued Lawrence].
"As you see it standing, growing, you feel at once it is symbolic.
And it seems male.

But when you come to know it better, you agree with the
Romans, it is female. 

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part, the fig-fruit:
The fissure, the moist conductivity, towards the centre."

It's a hot, steamy, late-summer evening.  Time for a fig.
Bill

Of pigs and pork in the hills outside Rome: when gourmet cooking meets us



Looking for porchetta in Ariccia



Found it!  Dianne watches her sandwich being made

We have to admit a craving for porchetta - that's the roast pork that is sold at road side stands, and also in shops around southern Italy.  But the classic porchetta is from a small town, Ariccia, in the hills outside Rome, the Colli Albani.

We heard from our friend, B, in the States, that even Gourmet Magazine had found its way to Ariccia.   Glad you finally made it, we say.

the view towards the Agra Pontina

Looking back at Ariccia from its bridge

Ariccia sits perched on the side of the hills with sweeping views of the plains that lead to the Mediterranean (the Agro Pontino - or Pontine Marshes, now densely inhabited after the Mussolini government's reclamation efforts).  It's a fun town to visit, with its tiny shops, many of them selling just porchetta. 

Ariccia is full of porchetta and pig references.  We rather like this anthropomorphic pig holding a piece of his own species (photo right).

You can get a sandwich to go - the best way to eat your porchetta.  You may not be used to the large piece of salty skin they throw in the sandwich.  And you can hit a bone now and then (Bill lost a piece of tooth to one years ago)- so caveat emptor.

Buon porchetta!

Dianne