All-You-Can-Eat Italian Food in Rome and STILL LOSE WEIGHT?!?!?
November 7-10, 2019
It’s a fine line knowing when to cancel a trip because of illness. Just because you feel bad the day the trip is supposed to begin doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to suffer for the duration. On Thursday, Kirb was an absolute mess, curled up in the fetal position on the couch in a sweatsuit, constantly dragging himself in and out of the bathroom from his misery perch. We had a flight that evening, and Mazz suggested that we call off the weekend in Rome and reschedule for another time. The flights were cheap and we would be staying with friends, so the lost expense would be minimal. Also, if Kirb had a stomach flu, it would be irresponsible for him to risk contaminating not only our friends’ house but an entire airplane getting there. Mazz is smart and pragmatic. Kirb is stubborn, and refused to cancel. This trip had already been planned and called off once, and he had been looking forward to eating Italian food in Rome for months. We would go, he would suffer through the worst of whatever garbage was happening inside his body, and then everything would be fine after a day or so and we would have a great time in Italy.
To Kirb, nothing seemed more irritating than canceling an entire weekend of fun because he felt bad on Thursday, only to wake up chipper on Friday, ready and raring for pasta. You never really know how a case of funky guts is going to play out, but most of the time you have an unfortunate day on the toilet and/or couch and then the next day you’re back to normal. In the worst-case scenario though, you’re sick for several days, miserable and writhing, full of cramps and bad poops, with zero desire and minor ability to eat solid foods. You hope and pray that a tummy ache never devolves this far. Kirb doubled down on the wager that his guts were only temporarily funky. Kirb bet wrong.
When our friend Giorgia took us out to a local spot for dinner Thursday night, Mazz ordered a bowl of pasta while Kirb cautiously sipped a glass of red wine, able occasionally to ingest some plain bread between bouts of hot and cold flashes. His shirt was covered in sweat. At one point, he ran off to the bathroom in the middle of a conversation, having to circle around the entire restaurant to find it. When he returned, Giorgia was visibly perplexed by his actions. Kirb, only partially paying attention to the conversation happening around him, had literally sprinted away from the table in the exact moment she had begun to explain to him that she was pregnant.
Giorgia already has a 13-year-old daughter, and we would be staying in her room for a few days while she was with her father. Kirb’s #1 goal in life that weekend was to not shit himself while sleeping in that teenager’s bed. This seemingly low bar was surprisingly difficult to clear. It was a lofted bed with a ladder, requiring patience and precise footing to exit, making each late-night sprint to the toilet a sleep-hazed obstacle course fraught with peril.
Thankfully for Kirb the next morning got off to a slow start, as Giorgia had several errands to run, one involving the police. Earlier that week, she had taken a drink of milk and found that it tasted strongly of gasoline. She reported it, and found that she was not the only one whose milk was a bit off. But how could milk possibly be contaminated with gasoline? She believed that the Centrale del Latte di Roma, the biggest dairy producer in Rome, had done something to aggravate the mafia, and the mob’s response was to basically poison a selection of their product. Giorgia was not particularly surprised that the incident never made its way into the newspapers.
In the afternoon we took off for our first walking tour of the city, making our way through her neighborhood across the Tiber River to Piazza Navona, which is surrounded by beautiful churches and marble fountains. We were surprised to see that the obelisk resting on top of the Fontana del Moro was covered in hieroglyphics, and Giorgia explained that there were several of them throughout the city that had been brought back from Egypt as long ago as the time of Caesar. The church next to the statue, Sant'Agnese in Agone, was brilliantly constructed with red and green marble columns and covered in frescoes. In the back they house St. Agnes' skull, which was surprisingly small.
The biggest surprise of the iconic Pantheon was that the roof has a big open hole in the top. It had been raining on and off that day, and nothing was keeping the center of the inside of the building from getting soaked. Old men in navy blue uniforms stood on pedestals around the periphery of the room, part of some ancient Roman order tasked with guarding the remains of the long-dead kings housed inside.
By the time we had made it to the ruins of the forum the rain was coming down in sheets. It was a remarkable sight nonetheless, with the ruins lit up and glowing in the dusk, spreading for blocks in all directions with the coliseum looming in the background. We decided to come back the following morning and give this area the time and attention it clearly deserved. Giorgia’s boyfriend Giovanni returned home that evening tired from a weeklong work trip, and with Kirb unable to eat more than just a few bites of food, our hosts decided to make us a quiet dinner at home of pasta with red sauce and chicken cooked in wine. Giorgia, ever the loving and doting Italian mother, let Kirb know sternly that he wasn’t allowed to drink any more wine until his stomach was better, and he begrudgingly agreed.
The next morning we resumed our exploration outside the coliseum. We bypassed the massive line to get into the Roman forum and instead entered around the corner at Palatine Hill, where there was no line. Both entrances are connected internally to the forum, and everything is included in the same ticket price, making the enormous line at the forum entrance particularly confusing. Here, Giovanni - a longtime resident of Rome - happily became our tour guide, regaling us with the histories of the ancient buildings. In the light of day, we were even more impressed by the sheer grandness of our surroundings, both in the “newer” architecture that was merely hundreds of years old and in the resiliency of ruins that had stood for millennia. Having been to many of the other great historical cities of Europe, the Roman forum struck us as singularly awe-inspiring in its scope. There was so much to see and learn and ingest that it felt like you could stare at it for a lifetime and have barely scratched the surface.
We explored Palatine Hill and the forum until we were simply too hungry to walk around any longer. Though the area surrounding the forum was rife with tourist traps, we were lucky to be visiting with locals who knew where to go. Giovanni guided us a few blocks to Taverna Romana, a trustworthy local institution. Finally, Kirb was feeling well enough to actually order and eat food, and he luxuriated in his first taste of proper Roman cacio e pepe. He was able to eat about half the serving of pasta before he was full and cramped up painfully. Mazz was much more equipped to dig into the lunchtime feast of cooked artichokes, a medley of innards and organs sautéed in wine and herbs, slow-cooked oxtail in red sauce, and guinea fowl with olives.
Not far from the restaurant, Giovanni led us next the Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli, which had a sculpture by Michelangelo inside, was free to enter, and had no lines. Virtually every street in Rome seemed to have its own opulent church, but this one in particular housed a massive scene of Moses that took Michelangelo 40 years to complete.
Afterward, we ran into a café to get out of the pouring rain and a friend of our hosts who lived in the neighborhood met up with us. He was a winemaker, and we asked if he knew anything about Italian natural wine, or “orange wine,” as we had wanted to try some while we were visiting. He told us that Italians don’t drink orange wine; there is red wine, and white wine, and sometimes rosé. Later in the evening we stopped by a wine shop down the street from Giorgia and Giovanni’s apartment and immediately saw one of our favorite German orange wines on the shelf. The guy working there came to see if we needed help, and we asked if he carried any similar wines from Italy. He began to show us a wide variety of bottles, and we relayed what the winemaker had told us earlier in the evening. He scoffed, then exclaimed, “We invented orange wine in Italy!” We bought two bottles on his recommendation and brought them back to the house where we sampled them with some incredible truffle salami and aged grana padano cheese. Giovanni, who had never tasted orange wine before and seemed skeptical of it in general, took a sip and remarked, “Ah! It's just farm wine.” Next time, we need to visit some Italian farms.
Kirb was feeling reinvigorated. His perpetual toilet nightmare seemed to have subsided that day, but it had been replaced with intense gas pressure on his insides. On the way back to the apartment he had obtained some Italian Fart Powder™ from the pharmacy, and after ingesting it he was feeling the best he’d felt all weekend. Still, everyone except Kirb ate a small supper (he was still far too full from the half a plate of pasta he had for lunch), and then it was decided that we should all go out and enjoy a bit of the Roman nightlife.
It was easy to see why Giorgia and Giovanni wanted to bring us to the Alcazar - the room setup felt instantly classic, with swanky booths in the back overlooking the dance floor and the name of the venue in lights over the stage. A British soul singer named Jodie Abacus was performing feel-good songs in the key of Stevie Wonder, and as far as random concerts go it was about as generally crowd-pleasing as you could ask for. That said, there was something strange about seeing a British man appropriate the American South for Italians. In the drink line, where you had to order and pay for your drinks at a cashier before bringing a ticket over to the bartenders, there was a man trying to pay with two different “old” 20 Euro notes and then a newer hundred Euro bill. The cashier carefully inspected each of them and handed them back one-by one, unwilling to take the counterfeit currency. Ah, the mafioso charm of Rome. After the set the venue transformed into a dance club, and we shuffled amicably while a girl in a small, shimmering silver dress visibly and audibly celebrated her 30th birthday all around us. As we left, sing-songing, “It’s my birthday!” to each other in a snobby intonation, Giorgia deftly snagged a plate of the girl’s birthday cake and we ate it laughing in front of the venue.
At first, Kirb was pretty upset that he still had a garbage body the following morning. But then he thought about how he had drank wine, then some grappa Giovanni had given him, a whiskey, and a beer without eating dinner and realized that his continued sad state was largely his own fault. The rain and clouds had finally cleared away, and we set off on a final sunny day exploring Rome on foot with our knowledgeable guides. First, they took us up the hill behind their house to the Spanish academy, where there was an exhibit from artist Miguel Ángel Blanco titled “Lapis Spectacularis” that showcased a variety of beautiful wood boxes arranged with stones and gems inside like terrariums. Giovanni brought up the historical significance of the building non-chalantly: “It is believed Saint Peter was crucified 100 meters from my house.” “That’s some history,” responded Kirb. “One of the guys from Modest Mouse lived in my neighborhood growing up.”
Our path took us up through Parco del Gianicolo past a stretching line of carved historical busts to a panoramic view of the city, then back down along the walls of the Vatican. Though the line to enter Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel was far too long for us to entertain joining in, it was more than enough for us to take in the beautiful square that housed them and the massive Egyptian obelisk that lay at its center. Had we been interested in waking up early that morning and fighting tens of thousands of people, we could have seen and heard the Pope give his sermon from a window facing the piazza.
Even on the way to the airport the tour continued on, with Giovanni pulling off on side streets to show us ruins and pointing out the ancient aqueducts sticking out from the fields along the road. There is so much to see and learn and absorb in Rome that it could easily be overwhelming, and both of us were incredibly grateful to have friends who were willing to give us a curated experience. Despite the persistent rain and Kirb’s gastrological distress, we both enjoyed Rome more than we had anticipated. Thinking about why that was the case, we wondered how much of it had to do with timing. Though Rome never has a particularly “low” tourist season, November sees a fraction of the volume of tourists as the summer months, which can also be unbearably hot. We loved Paris the first time we visited in late fall and then had a completely opposite reaction the next time we went in July. For our tastes - which do not include fighting large crowds and waiting in long lines - this trip was likely the best way for us to appreciate Rome: leisurely exploring the sights with no preset agenda, having knowledgeable locals guide us along, and getting to enjoy it all while eating and laughing with good friends.