sloo rome blog

Family pictures

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:42:17 -0700

We thought it would be good to have pictures that represent us. It is difficult to envelop in on-line pictures how delightfully Felix and Alaina move and laugh. I’m sure this is the complaint of amateur photographers everywhere. All the same, here is a selection of amateur pictures of us.

Why are there faces on the walls?

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 07:17:39 -0700

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.

This is not a letter-distribution chart for Italian.

Or is it?

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.)

Here is the standard sign for a sale e tabacchi shop of the sort where I have frequently bought tickets, but never either salt or sotweed. This one is by a pleasant little bookstore in the quieter part of old Trastevere, across the viale di Trastevere from our louder part.

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.

This place is convenient to the nightclubs in Testaccio.

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.

I hadn’t been to St. Peter’s before, and I got to visit with a gaggle of New York professors . Our timing -- about 7:30 on an early July morning -- and a lot of careful planning on the part of the Church gave us this view out the back.

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.

Each year we come to Rome, Alaina hunts around to see if we can sublet one of the apartments on top of the teatro Marcello. I don’t know how you get in, but maybe it’s by crane.

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.

This sign, at the ground floor of the ancient complex called Trajan’s markets, is made out of travertine and one of the more sensible indications that I’ve seen. It doesn’t need to be more specific -- every visitor knows that they want to go upstairs.

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.

The other famous spiral column is Trajan’s, which also tells a story. It has much better graphics than the column that everyone visting Rome sees. But even though the art isn’t refined, the column in p.za Colonna is really fun to look at.

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.

On transit

Sun, 8 Jul 2007 19:54:48 -0700

Felix and I spent much of Monday riding busses, trains, and trams to see parts of the city and, especially, bus-stops that we hadn’t before. It was wonderful.

From the corner near our house in Trastevere, we took the No. 8 tram along the viale di Trastevere southward past where we usually get off, at the Trastevere Station. The tram continues along the circonvallazione Gianicolense past two major and park-like hospitals. Where we got off, the streets were populated largely with nuns in habits and people in bandages or casts.

I had a coffee and Felix a glass of cold milk at this bar, in a little street in Monteverde. In the fine tour guide with a strange aspect ratio and bad paper called Rome with kids, among the many sensible sections is a particularly sensible one that says that one of the best things to do with kids is to “hang out in a bar”. Although this place is austere, it was extremely friendly, and we could easily have milked an entire morning of conversation, more coffee and milk, and some reasonable-looking lunchtime sandwiches from them.

The No. 8 runs along the median in broad avenues for its entire route. It stops at the lights, but it doesn’t get bogged in the traffic. The median is also open to the busses, which don’t use it much since their stops are at curbside; to emergency vehicles, which use it all the time because it’s quicker; and to taxis.

Over the weekend, we had a visit from our worldly California neighbor and old colleague John, who realized that he had to change planes on a Saturday somewhere in Europe, and Rome turned out to be an efficient choice between San Francisco and London. (Air travel, especially when it involves a weekend, can sometimes net these strange layovers; I was coming home from Seattle in May, and because of the way airline routes worked on one particular afternoon, it was cheaper and more fun for me to have dinner with a friend in Los Angeles and change to a commuter flight to San Jose than to fly straight home on one of the hourly shuttles from Seattle to San Francisco.) After a fine dinner at one of the Slow Food recommended trattorie in the centro storico -- a dinner at which I tried braised abbacchio in a standard Roman sauce as well as rigatoni with pajata -- John walked back to Trastevere with us.

When John was on his way back to jet-setting, it was the party hour here in Trastevere. After a few minutes at the empty taxi rank, John sensibly pointed out that we could just stand along the tram tracks, and a free taxi would show up. I filed this under useful travel detail, alongside remember to check if a strike is scheduled for the morning you leave to the airport.

This place is convenient to the nightclubs in Testaccio.

From the No. 8, we changed to a 719, which is a bus that runs back past Trastevere station, across the ponte Testaccio (which I had never crossed before), into the neighborhood called Testaccio. From Testaccio was the meatpacking district of Rome on and off over the centuries, and most of the guidebooks list it as a great place to eat offal or to go to a nightclub. To me, it just seems like an appealing and leafy sort of place.

At the Ostiense station, Felix and I got off and visited another station bar, at this one for a chocolate pastry. (Felix really likes chocolate, which is clearly an inherited trait.) Maybe there has been a campaign to clean up stations in Rome since I first came in 1991, or maybe my impressions have changed, but Roman train stations feel distinctly salubrious this summer.

From Ostiense, Felix chose a train going through to the Termini station so that we could see the fountain of the naiads in piazza della Repubblica. Termini is a whopping big terminus -- a terminus is like Boston’s South Station, most of Zurich Hauptbahnhof, or New York’s Grand Central: the trains’ tracks end in the station, so they have to leave in the direction they came. Termini is right inside the walls. I hadn’t visited it during this trip, although it’s where a lot of people get their first impressions of Rome: pretty fine 1930s architecture in the station itself, ancient baths across the way, and people from all over the world.

The naiad fountain is interesting, and some guidebooks say it was scandalous for its sensuality when built. It led Felix and me to talk about what makes bronze statues valuable. At 7, Felix has a distinct sense of the Olympic-medal-model for valuing materials. He knows about the minor metals like platinum and tungsten, and he’s even up on the difference in composition between brass and bronze, but there is clearly something significant about the triad bronze, silver, and gold. The fountain, thus, should have a substantial value because so much of it is in bronze.

I mentioned this, later, when Felix was picking out an ancient bronze key, to the septugenarian antique dealer. “Boys, especially about 7 to 10, all have the sense of a commerce in them,” he told me. I got the impression, although I’m not sure I understood exactly his words, that some boys never lost this sense.

A few days later, our old friend Ken was visiting and he said, “You know, I was just at the steelworks in Stuttgart, and the foreman explained that unreinforced concrete and steel have the same value: if you buy concrete and steel and spend the same amount, the pieces are very different sizes, but they can support the same load.”

I have been buying staples at one of the three supermarkets that you can get to from entrances on our block. The guidebooks say that there are few supermarkets in central Rome, that the traditional family alimentari are under threat from the supermarkets, that the supermarkets are open all night. I have no idea which parts are true. However, I do know that this kilo of salt cost me 9 cent. (That is, in my native currency, about 13 cents.) It tastes like it is fit for human consumption.

From Termini, we took a No. 5 tram -- and a very crowded tram -- into the neighborhood that I think is called Casalino, although this might take in Prenestino, Gordiani, and maybe part of Centocelle. This part of Rome is clearly not particularly fancy and I think it’s also really appealing.

We went to the end of the No. 5’s line, along the charmingly generic via dei Castani (Chestnut St). Felix suggested it was time to go home for lunch, and that suggested that it was time to go out for lunch, so we went to a tavola calda, which is pretty close to what people in California call a “steam table place”. Felix had some pizza bianca, which seemed to be his mood, and I ate a plate of delightful stuffed mushrooms (surprisingly piquant) and a bigger plate of spinach.

Gasmeter Square and Gasmeter Street are both in Ostiense, the pretty interesting neighborhood outside the walls south of Testaccio. The 1930s invented neighborhood of EUR is the one with all the contrived names that ring loudly of 20th-century technological myopia -- Astronomy St, Industry Square. But there’s Gasmeter Square in the midst of Ostiense.

From this part of Rome whose name I admittedly don’t know -- maybe it’s Centocelle -- we got on the 552, which is a delightful bus that runs along some major commercial streets, and then right through the neighborhood called Torre Spaccata on my map. There are shopping malls and big-box stores along the avenues. (Why are they called “big-box stores” in the press. Is it because of the shape of the building? The shape of what people buy there?)

The labels on Roman transport are distinctly bilingual, and sometimes bilingual yields “Emergency Command”.

We got off the 552 at a place called Cinecittà, which looks distinctly like it must be the movie studio where Roman movies are made. It has a metro stop, and we were ready for the cool quiet of the metro.

The S. Giovanni station is actually right outside the walls, while S. Giovanni in Laterano (which is the big church where the pope, who is the bishop of Rome, gets to act like a bishop) is inside. We walked for a little while through this neighborhood, familar from previous trips, and landed in a gelateria for a while.

The No. 3 tram rings much of the city, but construction has turned part of the line -- all the way from Trastevere station to Porta Maggiore -- into a bone-rattling bus line. We take it fairly often, but it is genuinely uncomfortable, and the no. 3 has been the only bus line anywhere on which Alaina and I cannot converse, because the clashing and crashing are so loud.

Nonetheless, Felix and I took the no. 3 home, between the Aventine hill and Testaccio, across the bridge to porta Portese, and then to our stop in front of the education ministry.

Book

I’ve been reading The pirate city, an adventure story mostly set in north Africa, by R.M. Ballentyne. It’s pretty odd, but it’s good bedtime reading. The essential driver of the story is a family of well-off Sicilian traders kidnapped and then enslaved in Algiers by a letter-of-marque ship, circa 1800.

Bolsena

Fri, 6 Jul 2007 16:19:26 -0700

We took a couple of days in a little beach motel on the shore of one of the biggest volcanic lakes in Europe, the lago di Bolsena. Our first day there was blustery. Or maybe it was more than blustery: it was so windy that the lake looked like a storm-torn sea, and swimming was essentially an act of playing among the waves.

The morning we left Viterbo for Bolsena, we talked about renting a car. Then we concluded that one of the pleasures of this trip for a Californian family was not having a car. So we took the bus. (Busses, in our experience, in Italy, are punctual, comfortable, and usually pretty fun. They’re a little more expensive than the trains, but they go to almost everywhere.)

Somewhat regrettably, the beach motel was a mile out of town (exactly 1.8 km from the center of town, according to the milestones, and a full kilometer from the city limits). The walk could have been pretty, and it certainly was manageable -- it’s just as far from our house in Menlo Park to the train station we use regularly. But this walk was along a busy highway with only a narrow, dusty verge on one side for most of the way. Felix complained, but his complaints were focussed entirely on the presence of road kill. When he thought a dead animal might be close to us, he’d close his eyes and have me guide him along the path.

And Bolsena has one taxi. The driver happened to be on vacation while we were there. So when it came time to go up to the hills on the other side of town to try a restaurant. We thought we were either out of luck or in for a long, long walk.

Instead, after an amusing discussion between the hotel clerk and the restaurant owner, the latter suggested that he’d just come by and pick us up a little before dinner time. The result: at 7:30 he pulled into the parking lot with his little car and drove us the ten minutes back -- and the 300 meters up -- to his house among the vineyards and olive groves overlooking Bolsena. He spoke beautiful country Italian -- pretty different from what we hear in Rome -- and he asked that we forgive the state of his car, since it was more often used for potatoes than patrons.

A native of Bolsena, Bruno is exactly the person you want hosting you at a restaurant. He is obviously devoted to the quality of ingredients, he doesn’t indulge in (or think much of) complication (I keep seeing the adjective elaborato, which I think is a Slow Food insult). And he’s genuinely funny.

The recent Slow Food guide, which combines in English the consortium’s hostelry guide with their restaurant book, is a wonder. If you read some of the Slow Food people, you would think they are all into restaurants and luxury service. But their heart, at least in the case of this book, seems to be in food nerdery, somewhere between chowhounds and foodies, but with an especial emphasis on local, disappearing, and seasonal ingredients.

This is the view from my seat on the deck at La Tana del Orso, over the Lago di Bolsena and its two islands. As we meandered through our dinner, the wind died down and the surface of the lake turned smooth. “It looks like it’s frozen,” said Felix. 20 minutes later, the owner’s neighbor asked us, “The lake appears as metal, does it not?”

And the little trattoria La Tana dell’Orso, in the hills above Bolsena, might be where I could eat every night for the rest of my life. Overlooking the huge crater lake, the menu is pretty much a collection of good sausages, cheeses, vegetables, pulses, and a few grilled meats. Bruno’s wife cooks, and he is the host and the shopper (and the taxi driver).

Our dinner: a plate of basic antipasto, with slices of cured pork loin, the oft-maligned soppressata (which in this case starred), and some alternative sausage. Then we had three interesting things: a plate of five cheeses, among which the best might have a been a true gorgonzola, which was streaked (not flecked) with green. But Alaina liked better a very ripe tête de moine, and especially something called testun de grotta. The more challenging cheeses we ate with a tiny bit of chestnut honey.

La Tana dell’Orso also gave us a fairly interesting sausage served on a bed of even more interesting lentils, which are evidently one of the Slow Food people’s treasures. Better, even, though, was a bowl of simple soup of farro and lentils -- the same lentils, and a bowl of soup that tasted in turn of the olive oil, the salt, the rosemary, the lentils, and the farro itself. Gosh.

On eating out

I realize, reading through some of the blog pages, that I sound like one of these people who just gush over food when they are on vacation, failing to admit these four things:

- most of us do not follow our waistline’s advice during vacation, so every meal feels like an indulgence;
- most of us work up an excellent appetite during vacation, and there is no better chef;
- inevitably, some of the food when travelling will be novel and interesting, so even if it’s poorly prepared, there’s something to pay attention to and little in our experience to compare it to;
- every thing that I’ve written about it actually pretty ordinary and covered admirably in the guidebooks.

That said, we’ve had mostly good food since arriving in Rome. A couple of places, chosen at random, were not up to snuff. And I was surprised to find that the pizza al taglio at the well-regarded bakery on via del Moro here in Trastevere can’t hold a candle to the pizza al taglio at the less hip bakery called Shock on the corner of p.za S. Cosimato (and thus four blocks closer to home).

My lunch one day at a small hosteria in Bolsena: little lake fish, lightly battered and quickly fried. Alaina and I both wonder why whitebait and eels are so seldom part of a balanced American diet. She likes eels, but avoids little fishies only because she doesn’t eat food that looks back at you.

I think I mentioned in an earlier entry that the role of the bar is kind of as a cure-all for bodily functions, in the same way that a tobacco-and-salt shop (tabacchi in Italian, although they are almost all licensed also to sell salt) is the cure-all for bureaucratic functions like paying a tax bill or buying a lottery ticket. In our experience, bars have coffee and pastries, usually a collection of edible-to-excellent sandwiches, bottled water and wine and beer, and lavatories.

An automatic trashcan. You thought you didn’t need an automatic trashcan, but you are missing the latest in improved hygiene. Just get near the cover, and it flips up so that you can dispose of your hand-towel without touching anything. The washroom at this particular pizzeria in Bolsena also has automatic lights, sinks and toilet flushing.

Head on wall with plants. Bolsena. Bolsena has a craftsman who remains quite good at faces. His Spanish wife make picture frames with pasta.

On money
Part of the challenge of this trip has been the plunge of the dollar, which is the currency in which we get paid at home. For the first time since I was little, the U.S. dollar is worth less than 50 pence, and it’s clearly plummeting toward U.S. 1.50 per Euro. The last time it was so weak, though, the Americans were embarked on wrongheaded but eventually reversible plans to rescue themselves from the 1970s malaise. This time, we can count on a 20-cent discount for the war tax, which will last for decades. Presumably, since the government of China (who would have expected this in 1980?) will eventually stop buying U.S. dollar bonds, it’s only going to get worse. I think I need a scheme to get paid more dollars or in Euros.

In Viterbo

Fri, 6 Jul 2007 16:07:10 -0700

If you are a little bit north of Rome and you are a pope and it is some time between 1145 and about 1280, you will spend time in Viterbo. It turns out you can also do this, without getting your head knocked off or being otherwise particularly inconvenienced, 800 years later and without all the funny robes. It’s a good thing, too: Viterbo seems like the kind of historical city that every teenager wants to be blasé about.

Felix and Alaina both thought Viterbo’s fountains much more serious than Rome’s -- but certainly none the less impressive for it.

After finding a small hotel to stay in (it looked like only about half the rooms were free), we spent our afternoon going from square to square to visit the fountains, the basilica, the fountains, and the staircases.

Viterbo makes me wonder at the crowds around the Trevi fountain. I mean, I like Bernini. I am, by all accounts, a vigorous Bernini advocate. I have even compared Bernini to William Shakespear and Neil Simon. But why is the Trevi fountain swarmed with sightseers and their cameras, while the belltowers and medieval quarter of Viterbo remains nearly empty.

Many of the bells in Viterbo are candidly on display. These, clearly well guarded, lacked the requisite ropes for ringing, but they look pretty impressive anyway.

We stayed overnight in Viterbo, mostly so that we could visit Villa Lante at the edge of the neighboring village of Bracciano. Villa Lante, a papal pleasure palace from the playful period among the more portentious popes, is mostly interesting for a descending series of diverse fountains and formal gardens, most of which you can visit in the shade of planes and pines. I saw lots of lizards, too, plus a crake.

Chimney in form of witch’s hat. Much recommended, especially if you happen to live in the medieval quarter of Viterbo.

One morning at 6:30, the streets of Viterbo around our hotel were full of these swifts (and quite a few swallows and collared doves).

The roof garden at the little hotel Tuscia was a gem. I love when modest hotels turn out so much more luxurious in their attractions than the five-star palaces.

Viterbo is connected by two different train lines to Rome, one an hourly commuter service, with stops along Lake Bracciano, and the other a minor line with no stops anywhere near where we live in Rome.

I’ve noticed that the tour books give transport advice distinctly aimed at someone staying in the centro storico in Rome, usually with Termini as a waypoint. This advice doesn’t hold well for people, like us, staying somewhere else -- until Felix and I went on a tram-, bus-, train-, metro adventure 20 days into our trip, we hadn’t set foot in Termini.

For example, most of the guidebooks will tell you that it’s more convenient to take a bus to, say, Tívoli than to take the train. This might be true if you live somewhere near the metro line that connects to Ponte Mammolo, but the train is simply faster if you are near to one of the stations outside the walls -- they are in a rough ring, from Nomentana, through Tiburtina, Tuscolana, Ostiense, Trastevere, San Pietro, and Valle Aurelia. The Tiburtina and Valle Aurelia stations also happen to connect to the metro.

Alaina called Viterbo “the city of wonderful staircases.”

Unaccountably, Alaina and I have both had wonderful visits to historic cities of about 70,000 inhabitants. We discovered this predilection during a trip in the early 1990s to Catalonia, where we were both quite smitten by the tidy little city of Vic, an hour north of Barcelona in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Viterbo had the same feeling: not perfectly provincial, not as brisk as a metropolis, and extremely friendly around the edges.

Slow Food’s guide led us to a family trattoria named after the Porta Romana, the gate at the southeast corner of the city wall. The owner in her 60s runs the place, her mom runs the kitchen, and the simple food delighted: a roast chicken, good pasta and sauce, simple potatoes.

Felix dismissed all of Viterbo’s drinking water as impotable. In fact, I ended up going to a bar at midnight to pick up three liters of water so that we weren’t parched by the morning.

Maybe the water is good for laundry.