AHhhh!! I'm melting!

It hardly bears saying, but damn, it is hot.

So much for the only Italian metropolis – today is the feast day for Saints Peter and Paul, a major holiday in Rome. There are wilted tourists wandering around everywhere, trying to figure out why nothing is open. The bars and cafes and most restaurants are doing business, but most Romans are at the beach. Some notable exceptions and non-exceptions: The entire ghetto is closed. Why not? The left-wing (read: communist) bookstore, on the other hand, remains true to its secularism and is open. The only stores on my street open are run by South Asians or Middle Easterners. I was very happy to be able to buy the liters and liters mineral water I need to stay alive in this heat at the grocers’ on the corner. Give them a few centuries and they’ll be taking all the Catholic holidays off too. (Or we’ll find all the shops closed on Muslim holidays – who knows?)

Yesterday I was in Bologna, apartment hunting. I loved it, absolutely. It is a very welcome change – a young university town, lively and mostly lacking in tourists. Most Bologna streets have porticoes over the walkways that kept me shaded but the city was still unbearably hot. It is, apparently, the hottest city in Italy, because of its situation among hills and mountains that block winds. I had no idea I’d be moving from Rome to an even hotter place. Yesterday was difficult and sweaty and all I wanted by mid-afternoon was to be in my own bed, but I made it through my apartment appointments and just barely to the train station on time to find my train was delayed. I was so hot and cranky that it took all my self-restraint and a half hour of Zen breathing exercises for me to not throw something at the fidgety old crank sitting across from me on the train.

So, some promising leads on places to live, but more to see next week.

Sono fidanzata con il mio laptop

Had the following dialogue today:

“Hai un fidanzato?” Do you have a boyfriend?
“N… sì, sono fidanzata con il mio laptop.” I’m engaged to my laptop. There were no further questions on that front.

warning: foodie post below

Recipe:
My anchovy and flat bean salad is marvelous. I have to share how I did this. But first, I must admit I ate a version of this out last week at Cavour 313, this is a reproduction, not an original.

First I blanched about a kilo of coralli, very long flat beans that I’d cleaned and sliced on a diagonal to 3 inch pieces. Within 5 minutes these were tender, and the produce lady tells me she makes a salad of them raw with just tomatoes and onions.
I dressed the beans while still warm in olive oil, salt, and the juice of two lemons. I let this cool for at least a half hour, so the anchovies wouldn’t get too hot, then tossed in pieces of marinated anchovy fillets – the silvery kind that are 4 inches long or so, both fillets still together, butterflied, cleaned and de-boned but with the skin on the outside. They’re filleted so cleanly you could reassemble the little fishes by putting the bones back in and sticking on a head and tail. The marinade from the anchovies is wonderfully sour and a little sweet: next time I’ll ask the grocer to leave more juices in for the salad (draining them is a courtesy since they’re expensive and sold by weight). These are nothing like the kind preserved in salt and oil we usually think of. I love the fact that they’re called alici – I think of little fishes named Alice.

You could try this with green beans since finding Italian bean varieties in the US is probably difficult.

Other cooking news: I’ve reached a new point in my culinary development. Whether it is a high point, I don’t know. I made a pasta sauce the other night with guanciale, smoked hog jowl, a typical Roman ingredient. I realized this was the first time in my life that I’d used a pork product from which I had to remove bristles (or more accurately, a pork fat delivery system). I did, however, some years ago, learn how to burn the remaining feathers off a freshly plucked chicken.

Anyone interested in cooking lessons in Italy, working on a farm for the olive harvest, truffle festivals, wine festivals and the vendage, etc. should let me know. I have a growing list of connections, especially of people wanting to trade free room and board for labor on an organic farm.

84 degrees and fair?

The weather bot on my blog cannot be right. It is boiling hot today. The whole city appears to be at the beach, there's really nothing going on.

I'm staying in to work on my database! YEA! I may have to go have a grapefruit gelato later.

Dinner tonight will be flat bean salad with marinated anchovy fillets, the big ones they have here. I found a store that has Calabrian specialties and other specialty foods on Via dei Serpenti with a half dozen kinds of marinating fishes. In the refrigerated case in front they have what looks to me like $50,000 worth of truffles, porcini mushrooms and oyster mushrooms.

Speaking of truffles, I've looked ahead to festivals in Bologna this fall: Northern Italy is a good place to be when they bring in the grapes and hunt for truffles and serve lots of game and fresh sausages. Think November visits, I'll scope out some agriturismo places.

grazie a dio e venerdi

Translated: Thank God it's Friday. I write this not as a cheesy comment, not borrwing from the marketing campaign for bad NBC tv programs of the early 90's, not alluding to the disgusting chain restaurant --> Grazie a dio e venerdi is actually the name of the best pizzeria in my neighborhood, maybe in all of Rome. I've only been once since I moved, the first night in before I had done any grocery shopping. I've been enjoying cooking so much that I haven't wanted to go out to eat.

Where the hell are the comments? Nobody loves me anymore?

I had a great exchange this morning with the produce lady. I woke up early to go to the neighborhood market (Mercato Rionale di Monti). It is pathetic compared to the bustling one in Prati, but I am not hauling across town three times a week for fruit in this weather. In any case, here was the lone produce lady, among abandoned stalls, happy to start in on complaining about the heat as soon as I walked in. I asked about the provenance of her plums - what I meant was to find from what region they came (having just experienced otherworldly stone fruits from Emilia-Romagna), but she thought I was asking whether they were Italian or not. I got an earful about how she doesn't sell any garbage from Spain or Tunisia, her fruit is all Italian. "Look at these nespoli! Look at how ugly they are! Just like they look on the tree, not all plastic and artificial." I was worried that I'd offended her, but I realized what I'd done was give her a chance to brag about something she clearly cares about. We were all smiles when I left, me with a heavy bag of produce and some recipes she insisted I try, and she having parted me with what is undoubtedly a little more money than she'd have gotten out of the grumbly old ladies who fight over every ounce.

I love this neighborhood. Today I ran into two of my old buddies, one standing outside his shop wanted to make me try on the hats in the window, another walking down the street literally dragged me into a bar for a coffee and set plans for dinner next week. I'm also making all kinds of new friends, the area is so active that everyone introduces me around to everyone they know.

I'll miss it terribly when I have to go. I'm sure I'll find something similar in Bologna.

This is what I woke up to today - this view is what I see when I open my eyes, the windows wide open and a full moon reflecting all the colors of the sunrise. The light actually woke me up - this was 5 am. I went back to sleep for a couple of hours, when I realized nothing would be open for hours and hours.

Rumors of my death at the hands of a Roman hairdresser have been greatly exaggerated.

what is the flight velocity of a european swallow

So there's the well-known saying, "Never trust a skinny chef". You may think you know where I'm going with this but this isn't a food posting. Two words: bald hairdresser.

I've been itching to get a haircut since I've been in Rome, hoping I'd find a place where I could get a really funky playful new style that isn't what all the New York hipsters are wearing. No conservative trims for me. I was amused to see a salon called "Contesta Rock Hair" around the corner from me near Piazza dei Zingari. This was what I'd been looking for, these are people who could slice into my hair without regards for symmetry or conventional layering. And they did.

I walked out of the shop with my curls frizzed out in all directions, about four inches straight up off the top of my head. The back is tapered to the hairline, long layers at the crown and just a tiny fringe at the neck. The long layers angle down towards my face, to my ears, where I have side curls almost like a Hassidic man. Then some shorter pieces of various lengths to set off my face. I rushed home to wet the mess down and get some calming products in, and it actually looks great when I style it. But my crazy bald hairdresser wanted me to have the biggest hair he could make. I was upset for a while, thinking he was playing a trick on me, but the cut underneath all the poof is so good that he couldn't have been malicious. Living vicariously through lots of hair I guess.

And now for something completely different: I was just having a rest in my bed, looking up through my windows at the swallows (European swallows, not African ones) diving after bugs thinking what fast metabolisms they must have flying like that all the time, eating up mosquitos non-stop. Hummingbirds probably have little hearts that go so fast they'd be hard to detect. What about all that sugar water that we feed hummingbirds? That can't be good for them. They're supposed to be eating flower nectars, which I'm sure have all sorts of vitamins and things. We're just giving them empty calories so we can watch them in our yards. Are we creating a health problem for hummingbirds? Are there little diabetic hummingbirds keeling over at an early age from too much red syrup?

a cautionary tale with a happy ending

Oops, out of time before I started. This post will have a nice picture, but you'll have to wait until tomorrow. Nothing much exciting is happening, I'm in the library all day, but I do have anecdotes to share. Tomorrow you'll hear why not to ride a motorino in Piazza Venezia, why you should look carefully at your hairdresser before putting your head in his hands, and some random orinthological concerns I scribbled out today.

who is that crazy person jumping into the picture? actually, I'd failed to keep my eyes open for a dozen pictures and so...

Laura

Nellie

Dominique

they doubted my competence with the camera at this point...

Venice report

Nellie and Dominique and I had the most fun in what must be one of the weirdest cities in the world. Aside from the facts that most of it isn't built on land, that the tourists in a year outnumber the inhabitants by a factor of 60, that the dialect is completely indecipherable if you only speak Italian, that the place is basically a labyrinth, the weirdness emanates from the Venetians themselves. They are a wonderful, depraved bunch.
Nights started early in Venice compared to Rome. By 7, the folks I met started a tour of the handful of eating and drinking establishments of the city not catering to tourists. The evening starts with strong aperitifs, a spritz (white wine or prosecco with soda and Aperol or Campari or another bitter liqueur) at a bar. Because we were having a little vacation, we had sit-down dinners in cheap trattorie where we could get a plate of pasta in squid ink sauce or spaghetti with clams, maybe a mixed fry of squid and shrimp afterwards (which they serve with polenta, which struck me as strange). In the wine bars, most were just have a series of cicchetti, little bites of codfish canapes, octopus salad, etc. Drinking prosecco all the while. Dinner ended with sgroppino (sp?) , lemon sorbetto blended with grappa. Finally, off to a bar to hang out. This would kill you, but the bars close by 2 and everyone walks home down the deserted but entirely crime-free streets.
Saturday afternoon we went out to Lido, the island between Venice and the Adriatic Sea. It isn't a particularly nice beach, but great to see big groups of friends lying about in the sun (after trying to keep up with one of their Friday nights, you're not up to much else). Saturday night we had a special dinner of seafood antipasti, mixed fish grill, and ice cold prosecco from a draught. Marvelous. We stayed at the table until the surly Russian proprietress literally kicked us out. Grazie mille a Dominique for being such an excellent hostess, and to all the wonderful people we met.

finalmente!!!

I gave myself a present this afternoon of a small splurge on lunch at Cavour 313, where I enoyed a salad of marinated anchovies and flat beans with some roasted red pepper and ricotta spread on crusty bread and a little glass of white wine. That in itself was wonderful, but made even more so when I ducked into an alley to take the long way home rather than the short unshaded way. On the cool pavements of Via della Madonna dei Monti I discovered a new bar with some kind of writing about travel library on the shopfront. On closer inspection, it is an elegant little cafe/bar/bookstore/travel agency that is promoting itself as encouraging exploration of the world - come read books on travel. buy books on travel, enjoy a drink, and hopefully book a trip through them. Cool enough so far but the best part....free wireless internet. This is unheard of! The access is reserved for customers, however, so I have to sit and have some sparkling prosecco with the little bites they bring me alongside it. I'm so excited, I don't know if these people understand they've just taken on a tenant.

enjoyed myself to death in venice

just back, exhausted from such a fun weekend with Nellie and Dominique in Venice. I can't concentrate long enough on the screen to go into details now, but have fish tales to tell (about eating them) and maybe a few pictures. Hang in there for the next exciting episode...

new home

Some misadventures along the way, but I've made it to my new home in Monti. It was impossible to call a taxi this morning -- raining so everyone wanted one -- so I had to drag my gigantic bag towards a populated area to try to hail one. On the way, I stopped to ask some old men standing in the doorway of a barbershop where the nearest place to find one would be, they insisted on calling for me and entertaining me with stories about their experiences in New York. Divertente.
I've unpacked my things at Giulia's, I'm very content to settle into my old room. Giulia is wonderful, we enjoyed talking again after years.

unpacked just in time to pack for Venice. it's a tough life.

da Trastevere a Monti

Tomorrow I move in with Giulia and the following day run off to play in Venice with Nellie and Dominique. I'm squirming in anticipation.

lungotevere

I had a great walk home this evening along the Tiber, one of those sudden moments of awareness of everything going on around me and in my head as if I'd just dropped out of the sky. "Hold on, how did I get here? What is this place?". I was listening to Regina Spektor, so adorably pretentious and naive at the same time; she was taking me from near tears to giggling aloud. I was noticing all the weird details around me, the bronze sword-weilding angels on the bridge, creepy discarded objects on the sidewalk: beer bottles, bloody newspapers (I swear there was a body part wrapped in it, I scuttled past imagining an ear or a hand), lost clothing. It was exactly that time of late afternoon when the sun strikes at a soft-focus angle and casts a warm color over the stones. Squished apricots had fallen from a tree inside someone's walled garden.

I'm off to enjoy my evening. Some fotos and restaurant recommendations to follow.

Goodbye Via dei Panieri!

goodbye tiny kitchen in Trastevere!

Cloisters at San Giovanni in Laterano

cloisters

Mom's last day in Rome

Mom's last awkward picture of me

Ferrara

Sicilian restaurant with heavenly tuna in agrodolce and great wines

Excellent Sardinian food

of course...the menu

almost forgot...

At Ferrara, which had the most exciting menu I've seen yet, I started with a puree of fava beans and peas served with dollops of exquisite Amatriciana sauce -- tomatoes cooked to perfect concentration of their flavors with guanciale (sort of bacon made with hog jowls) -- and ricotta. Then I had veal liver with pancetta (more bacon!) and arugula. Mom had zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta, not mozzarella, and just sauteed, not deep-fried, followed by wild asparagus and lobster risotto. All of it was truly magnificent. Instead of dessert we each had a little glass of amaro made by somebody's grandmother's secret recipe... Not cheap, but so worth a splurge.

Last night out -- had an amazing dinner at a restaurant and enoteca in Piazza Trilussa.

da sola

Mom left this morning, I was pretty bummed. Sublimated by getting down to work, albeit in my pajamas at home over too many cups of coffee.

Yesterday we had a big day, out to the massive cathedral, San Giovanni in Laterano and then to my favorite favorite church in Rome, San Clemente. Under the 'modern' church (16th c.?) are the archeological sites of the previous early church and an ancient Roman Mithras cult site underneath that. It is labyrinthine and cold and damp, 40 feet under the earth. We wandered around down there, feeling more and more uneasy, though I told Mom not to be a wimp. Then, completely silently, a couple popped out of a dark doorway and scared the beejeesus out of me, I jumped and yelled, Mom startled, and the two just stared at me without any evincing of humor at all. We of course, giggled and clutched each other's arms until we escaped the spookiness.

We had an incredible dinner at Ferrara, an enoteca and restaurant here in Trastevere. We had to sit in the piazza with glasses of wine and plates of antipasti until the restaurant opened at 8, which was fine with me but struck Mom as slightly dangerous, considering the traffic still stuttering through. The absurd Trastevere bus made a cameo appearance as we waited - this tiny little bus has a mysterious route that we've not been able to figure out, we've never seen any stops but it keeps appearing randomly in a piazza when we're having coffee, running us down on a narrow street. It is like the paperboy character in "Better Off Dead"...

I'm trying to figure out how to get to Turkey at the height of the season in August. Too expensive. Tomorrow I'll make a stop at the student travel agency, but I'm worrying I may have to take the 30 hour ferry.

final day with Mom

we had a quick stop in the Porta Portese this morning - the place is such a zoo - to get a special present for one of my relatives. now you can all anticipate who gets a present...

I really enjoy haggling with the merchants. The African men with their knock-off goods can be so relentless, I am learning the feigned disinterest, the mild insults of quality of goods, the slight curl of the upper lip and clear willingness to walk away at any time that is getting me half the prices they start with.

Off to some of the important churches and hopefully a stop at Cavour 313 for lunch, one of my favorite enoteche. I'm hoping for plates of artisanal cheeses and wine tasting and probably a well-deserved nap afterwards.

The cold is much better.

daisy millerfied

Unlike Daisy I've been taken out by an ordinary cold - no dramatic death by malaria for me. It is an excellent excuse to sit in the sun, eat lots and read. Mom is cooking for me: lots of fresh pasta made by the Sardinian folks down the street and of course salads of this gorgeous produce.

We walked out of the apartment this morning to have a coffee and pastry on Piazza della Malva, one of our favorite quieter spots in Trastevere. The restaurateurs were out getting deliveries of crates of zucchinis with blossoms still on them, rucola, tiny French beans. By now all the tourists are out and it is getting hot, time for us to retreat to the botanical gardens or some other out of the way spot.

no time to waste at the internet point. Mom has gifts to buy for the family and I have a sinus headache coming on.

a presto

...and I'm finding affirmation for mine.

Mom is finding inspiration for her work...

My mother is losing her mind. Taking pictures of smoking lions.

Isola Tiberina

If you could only smell this wall of jasmine...you'd be as sniffily as I am. :(

Mom and I both love Bernini's elephant.

Take the damn picture!!!

Me in front of our apartment

fotos!

I owe my faithful readers, both of you, some pictures. I've been very busy between getting to the library and entertaining the staff there with my complete ineptitude figuring out the process of getting books and accompanying my mother to various sites in this sculpture Mecca. Then, of course, thinking about what to eat is so hard...

Yesterday the weather was too beautiful to stay inside, cool and sunny, so I skipped the library to go to the Modern Art Gallery in the Villa Borghese with Mom. It was a fantastic place, with no tourists or crowds of any kind. Modern, by the way is 19th century to the 1950s. I was happy to get to see some Futurists, who I am repelled and fascinated by.

On the gastronomic front, we've been eating out often but have cooked simple dinners for ourselves as well. The best restaurant find so far has been a Sicilian place Mom spotted, where we had a marvelous fresh tuna in agrodolce, baked ricotta with orange mostarda to start, swordfish stuffed with breadcrumbs and a caponata that elevated eggplant to a celestial plane. Lots of simple pizza dinners, but even those are fantastic. My favorite, and I have to really force myself not to eat them all the time, are the pizzas baked plain - with raw buffalo mozzarella and raw cherry tomatoes and basil or arugula on top. Also the zucchini flowers and anchovies...

now some photos:

a quickie

a hurried end of the day post -- have to meet Mom or she'll think I've been kidnapped by gypsies, or more correctly, individuals of Sinti-Roma descent...

great success today in the archives. I'm giddy from the amount of information I have to somehow process without using digital photography, photocopying, or scanning. I need a spy camera to sneak into the national library. Today's big realization: between Columbia and the New York Public Library I have been very spoiled indeed.

finally, a real post.

Ok, so this internet access thing is settled.

So many things to report -- gastronomic adventures, adjusting to a rhythm of life that includes a nap, an obligatory hour of sitting in the piazza people-watching before dinner, and pretending whole-wheat croissants are a healthy breakfast (who knew such a thing existed!?).

I've been getting really antsy to be out all over the place, Mom has been enforcing a realistic schedule of not exhausting myself. We've had a little tension lately in the afternoons, particularly when it comes to navigating Trastevere. It is so easy to get lost; for every street there's a perpendicular alley with the same name: a Via della Scala and a Vicolo della Scala, etc. My famous intolerance for, well, other people has been pronounced.

Yesterday was the Festa della Repubblica, the big national holiday with fireworks and parades and shops closed... we avoided most of the hooplah but saw a procession of militari on horseback that we both enjoyed. It was the ponies we liked, not the procession. We tried out Roman Jewish specialties near the Portico d'Ottavia, fried artichokes and lambs' brains. Very tasty though difficult to talk myself into. I had a hard time looking at what I was eating, though the texture is lovely.

After a long walk around Trastevere and the ghetto in the morning, then more of Trastevere in the afternoon, we sat down to a hilarious dinner near our apartment. The Hostaria Botticella had the most amazing menu posted outside, but dinner was a little disappointing. Mom had wonderful homemade gnocchi with saffron and zucchini blossoms, and my pasta with favas and speck was good, but not the knockout I was hoping for. We did have a great time watching the neighbors setting up dinner on the front stoop, a friendly yellow cat chased around by our restaurateur and fussed over by passers-by, a Smartcar coming inches from running over a German fellow diner's toes, and a series of itinerant musicians playing the Godfather theme and Sinatra tunes....

off to the library today. more later.

sono arrivata

not many chances to update...

sitting with Mom in an internet point, no sign yet of any places I'll be able to use wireless access. I may wind up hanging out in luxury hotel lobbies with my laptop, using their networks. will write more and upload pictures when I get these technical issues worked out.

I do have a cell phone now - I can email the number to friends and family.