Across our courtyard (starting at 2.1 m from our kitchen window -- I measured), workmen have been spending their month gutting and now finishing a renewed space. For us, the upshot has been a lot of noise, especially the noise of the angle grinder. I’m not sure it would be far off to claim that the angle grinder plays the role in city sounds today that the organ grinder did in European city sounds circa 1923.

I haven’t written enough in this blog about the amount of time we’ve spent exploring Rome’s gelaterie. Probably anything I wrote would be fatuous. In brief, though: the granita di caffè at the duly famous Alberto Pica blows away that from the more popular Sant’Eustachio. There is a new and well-heeled place called Gelateria del Teatro, even closer to the tourist center of Piazza Navona, that has an extraordinary way with yellow plums. I was most smitten by the granita di mandorla from an avowedly Sicilian establishment in Prati. (It is next door to another Sicilian place devoted to arancini.) Felix has devoted himself to stracciatella and chocolate this trip. (Stracciatella does not contain rags, in spite of the name, and it is not egg drop soup, which shares the name. It is just chocolate swirl.)

In one of the books in the Series of Unfortunate Events, Esmé Squalor, on discovering that aqueous martinis are out and parsley soda is in, revises plans to go to the Fish District in order that one of the other henchmen can get directly to the Beverage District, a place not suitable for children.

Some cities have the equivalent of Fish and Beverage districts for specific manufactured products. I’m sure that both city planners and novelists have a name for the phenomenon whereby you get clusters of similar retail businesses -- locksmiths along two streets in Mexico City, diamond merchants around one block in Manhattan, steel wire in a cluster of streets in Hong Kong.

Rome has, for example, an offal district. It’s the part of the city where, if you ask most Romans about their famed quinto quarto foods, you will be dispatched. Historically, as all the guidebooks blithely repeat, the Testaccio neighborhood had the slaughterhouses, the slaughterhouse workers got paid partly in offal and cheap cuts (nothing new here -- most offal needs to be cooked soon to make it palatable), so cooking variety meat developed most extensively near the slaughterhouses.

But the fact is that these traditional dishes are available in restaurants all over the city. Some of them are meat dishes: coda alla vaccinara is oxtail, and it’s braised, and it’s a fairly tame dish that most people who eat beef would recognize. Abbacchio, which is most narrowly suckling lamb and very pale, but seems to be used by a lot of people just as the Roman word for spring lamb, is really just that. One of the most popular preparations is simple grilling, often described as scottadita, or ‘finger burning’, because the chops are best while quite hot. No doubt there are Roman jokes that it’s actually scottalingua.

Some of the offal dishes are less approachable by the typical steak eater. Of those that I tried, here are my summaries:

nervetti are just beef tendons, usually from the foot. They are a plain dish, and to many people are familiar from the tendon that you might get in a southern Chinese beef stew, or -- even more commonly -- in pho.

Etymologically, nervetti is a little confusing, since nervo is ‘nerve’, so nervetti should presumably be small nerves of some kind.  I consulted a most helpful Italian etymological dictionary, and it’s pretty clear that nervo was originally applied much more generally to tendons, ligaments, and other pieces of tissue like them -- nerves, the dura, and probably other bits. So nervetti acquired its current culinary meaning -- which it also has in Milanese as nervètt -- and also turned into a moderately common Italian surname.

Culinarily, the Romans tend to serve nervetti cubed or diced and dressed a little like a salad. It’s a pretty good but slightly monotonous way to eat this part of beef, which might have the strongest beef flavor.

pajata is one dish that the English-language cookbooks all gloat over -- veal small intestines. At my cheese class, which I took at San Francisco’s Cheese School, the instructor went through the history of cheese, explaining that rennet is produced in the last stomach of kids, lambs, and calves. Curdling the milk before it enters the intestines makes it move more slowly, so the baby dairy animal absorbs more of the nutrition from the milk. If you slaughter and eat the dairy animal, its small intestines are full of fresh cheese. This whole business is supposed to gross you out.

Unfortunately, even though I had pajata in a good trattoria in Rome, and the preparation was clearly as careful as that for the other dishes at our table, I have to express my preference: the Roman preparation that uses the pajata in pieces as part of a sauce for pasta, including tomato and the traditional Roman spices, is not my favorite treatment.

Fortunately, I can get pajata, or its equivalent, at home. The tripas in my market around the corner in California are pretty much the same thing. My favorite way of having them is simpler than the Roman preparation, but it is available in most of the taquerias near home and I think it lets you taste the cheese part better: chopped up and fried in oil with some spices and salt, then just served on a tortilla, maybe with salsa, as a taco.

The best offal dish I had during the month is the most popular: trippa alla romana. This is honeycomb tripe (tripe from the reticulum, or second stomach section), slow cooked, but served in a sauce with grated, salty pecorino cheese and mint on top. I remember reading tripe described as the chicken breast of meat: distinctive texture to satisfy the mouth, definite protein content to satisfy the  hunger, and not much flavor to overpower creative sauces. That’s about right: tripe does (like good chicken breast) carry flavor, but it also carries a wide range of sauces well. And tomatoes plus mint plus sheep cheese is a good sauce to bear.

Incidently, these quinto quarto dishes are on a lot of menus, but I didn’t see a lot of people serving some of my favorites, at least by themselves: kidneys, chicken livers, and -- surprisingly absent -- sweetbreads. Sweetbreads always seem like the key to introducing outside-eating carnivores to innards. They grill perfectly, their flavor is accessible and not too strong, and the texture isn’t as surprising as kidneys, liver, or tendons.

During our last ten days in Rome we had a few overnight guests, all of them professors from New York.

Among them, the computer science professor couldn’t tell us too much about the history of the architecture we were seeing, but he deftly identified each of the showtunes being played (mostly poorly) by the street performers. He also regaled us with puns about almost anything that came up. (It turns out that ropes are a particular fertile subject for punning. Who knew?)

The 19th-century American literature professor could list all of the 19th-century American adventure novels that mention Rome, in what capacity Rome appears, and their sales figures. But he also has an eye for what will strike the popular imagination, and he appreciated some of the delightful details about daily life: the water fountains have hole on the top of the spout, and if you put your finger over the downspout, you get a drinking fountain; it is fundamentally confusing that in Italian retail, you sometimes have to decide at one end, go to the other and pay, then return to the deciding end with your scontrino.

And among the professors was a medieval art historian. We glommed onto her like limpets, trapsing through church after church -- from gargantuan St. Peters through to the 3rd-century basilica in the first basement at San Clemente to the Renaissance take on what-will-we-do with the baths downtown -- learning exciting facts all the way.

We went to a Chopin concert one evening just on the other side of that crane. There are lots of outdoor music events in Lazio during the summer. Take advantage of them, if you are there.

Book

No one else I know has bothered to read Agatha Christie’s The mysterious affair at Styles. I did, and it was a sound soporific. I also thought it was a kooky take on the classic adventure story, with a parrot, the police, and train travel.

Pronunciation

Italian is often cited for the consistency of its pronunciation. That is, the relationship between what you see written and how it is said is straightforward.

It is so allegedly straightforward, in fact, that there is a chestnut about how languages should be written out: “Vowels as in Italian, consonants as in English.”

There are a bunch of simple pronunciation rules in Italian, although they are not always easy for an English speaker to follow. They are genuinely logical, though. (Kindly keep in mind that standard Italian is based, at Dante’s decision, on Tuscan. I hear Roman and other pronunciations mostly.)

There are seven vowels, written with five letters: a, e, i, o, u. E and o have two slightly different pronunciations each, an open one and a closed one.  The difficult thing for English and German speakers is that the vowels retain their sounds in unstressed syllables. That is, the e in polenta is still pronounced like e. Few English speakers can do this consistently.

Stress in Italian is very, very strong. The stressed syllable often gets both a loud sound and a high pitch. The accent is not always predictable, even though there are some intricate rules. Italian marks stressed syllables when they violate these almost inscrutable rules: caffè, pietà.

The consonants are very similar to those in standard American English, but the vowels are not. The vowels are really different from the diphthongs that are used throughout the American southeast.

The spelling change that trips most American people up is this:

- ch is always like k in English. (Italian doesn’t use k at home.)

- ci is like ch in English. Two shorthands: ci by itself is pronounced like ci + i. Ce is pronounced liked ci + e.

There is a similar rule for g:

- gh is always like hard (goon) g in English.

- gi is like j in jet in English. Two simplifications: gi by itself is pronounced like gi + i. Ge is pronounced like gi + e. 

I think the simplifications are the hard part for English speakers, but they are also historically justified.

A few other letters are difficult:

- z (and zz) are sometimes voiced and sometimes not. Pozzo ‘well’ and pizza ‘pizza’ usually have just the ts sound. Zio ‘uncle’ has closer to English dz.

- x is almost always like ss. Taxi is often pronounced as if it were tassi.

Italian has one important sound that is unfamiliar to English speakers, unless they are Scots: r. Betwixt vowels, a single r is pronounced a lot like English l, but with more tongue.

The rr combination is a trilled r, which most English speakers must learn. In standard Italian, rr is written with one r at the beginning of a word. Roman pronunciation tends to pronounce some single r consonants as trilled, especially before stops, but even in words like torla.

One of the best rules in Italian pronunciation is the double consonant rule. Italian is full of things written out as double consonants. You need to pronounce them differently from single consonants. Here are some surprising things about this:

- Most sounds written with two letters are treated as double consonants. For example, gn is the same sound as ñ in Spanish or ny in Catalan, but the Italian sound is doubly long in most cases. (Incidentally, the twiddle on top of the Spanish ñ was originally an n.)

- Only rr is genuinely a different sound from its single version of r. The other double consonants are long forms of the single consonants. (As in Arabic, the double l is a pretty different sound from the single l, but maybe it is not categorically different.)

- In dialect, double consonants at the beginning of words are sometimes written out. In Roman dialect, the city’s name is sometimes spelled (and it is always pronounced) Rroma.

- Italian, for double consonants, has very few of what the linguists call “minimal pairs”, which are pairs of words that are identical except for one feature. This is in part true because a lot of kinds of Italian, like Neapolitan, do not have all of the Tuscan double consonants. For example, the Italian word caffè  is just cafè in Neapolitan.

It is a very mild myth that Italian is always pronounced like it’s written. There are plenty of loan words for everyday things. I encountered several times the word garage, for example, which is pronounced like in French or (American) English.

These exceptions aside, Italian is okay for foreigners to pronounce: it does not strive vehemently to confound -- unlike English where ouija, chamois, and chichi all rhyme with heebie-jeebie, honeybee, plaintively, and Tripoli, but not with Paris. (Zowie.)

More importantly, most Italian speakers seem to have heard their language pronounced all sorts of different ways. Travelling around is made more manageable because the native speakers have lots of experience with mispronunciation, bad prosody, misplaced stress, and sloppy consonants. I remember how surprised people were in parts of Hungary that I would try to pronounce words correctly -- and they still didn’t understand. I, who mispronounce things in different languages often, can tell that I am really, really bad at Hungarian and Cantonese, but not so terrible at Finnish, Mandarin, and French.

One thing I am having trouble with is the strong distinction that Italian makes between u and o, even in unstressed positions. You’ve probably noticed that the Romance languages are pretty flexible on this point: the word for or is pronounced u in some languages like French and Portuguese, and o in languages like Spanish and Italian. In English, we don’t differentiate much between these sounds. But in Italian -- or at least in Roman -- they do.