Lazio

by Joseph Harris

After Athens, Rome is the father of us all.

Everything that follows is the evidence. The law. The language, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and the Latin that runs underneath English like a subterranean river. The calendar. The concept of the republic, which San Marino borrowed and the United States studied. The roads, some of which are still in use. The aqueducts. The architectural vocabulary that every public building in Washington DC is still trying to speak. The Catholic Church, which is Rome wearing different clothes and has been for two thousand years. And the food, the pasta, the olive oil, the wine, the market culture, the trattoria, the whole idea that eating together at a table is a civilized act worthy of serious attention.

Rome did not invent all of this. It absorbed it, organized it, codified it, and distributed it across three continents. The Greeks thought of it first, Rome built it at scale and made it last. Athens gave us the idea of democracy. Rome gave us the infrastructure to run one. Athens gave us philosophy. Rome gave us law. Athens gave us tragedy. Rome gave us the Colosseum, which is tragedy at architectural scale with better sight lines.

And then Rome fell, which is the most instructive thing it ever did, because what survived the fall tells you what actually mattered. The roads lasted. The language lasted. The Church lasted. And the food lasted, the same ingredients, the same techniques, the same cucina povera logic that the poor of Rome developed when the empire was at its height and never had reason to abandon because it was correct from the beginning. The next time we do Lazio we are going to be serving actual Roman food made from recipes 2,000 years old. This time we are making Italian Rome.

Cacio e pepe is two ingredients and a technique. Carbonara is four. The Roman kitchen does not complicate what is already right. That is also Athens. That is also the Mendocino Coast.

I have never been to Rome. I want to say this clearly before I say anything else, because it is the kind of admission that should be made upfront, and because the explanation for it is not flattering. Rome has always seemed to me, and I recognize this is ignorance speaking, like too much. Florence on a lethal dose of steroids. A city so dense with what civilization has produced, so layered with the accumulated weight of two millennia of architecture and art and history and religion and politics and traffic, that standing in it feels like it might require a patience I am not sure I have. I am more interested in the less hurried parts of Italy. The hill towns. The fishing villages. The mountain kitchens.

Of course, I am wrong about this. I know I am wrong about this. Rome is not a city you approach at your own pace. It is a city that has been waiting for you specifically, a place that has outlasted every objection anyone has ever raised about visiting it, and which will still be there whenever you are ready. The Pantheon has been standing since 125 AD.

The average Roman, I am told, walks past the Pantheon the way I drive past the redwoods on Highway 1. It is just there. It has always been there. The building with the unreinforced concrete dome that has not been improved upon in two thousand years is a landmark for giving directions. Turn left at the Pantheon. The indescribable beauty of a place becomes invisible to the people who live inside it. I understand this completely. I understand it while cleaning the grease trap by the kitchen line when service is overflowing and the beauty of the Mendocino Coast, the headlands, the fog, the light on the water in the late afternoon, is approximately fourteen inches from my left elbow. The Roman and I have this in common. We are both standing in paradise and cannot see it because we are working.

Florence has the Uffizi and the Duomo and the David and the Ponte Vecchio and Brunelleschi’s dome, which the furnace workers built on pork stew and black pepper and Chianti. Rome has all of that, the Vatican Museums alone contain more art than most countries, and then keeps going. The Forum. The Colosseum. The Palatine Hill where the emperors lived. The Borghese Gallery. Bernini’s fountains. Caravaggio in churches you can walk into for free on a Tuesday morning. The Campo de’ Fiori market where Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy in 1600 and where they sell artichokes and tomatoes and fresh pasta every morning of the week. Rome is not a city with a cathedral. Rome is a cathedral with a city inside it.

The food is the same. The Roman kitchen has more to say than any single Tuesday night can contain. Cacio e pepe and carbonara and amatriciana and gricia are the four great pasta preparations of the city and each one is a lesson in restraint that takes years to learn and a lifetime to perfect. The oxtail braised with tomato and cocoa and cloves in the Testaccio neighborhood, coda alla vaccinara, was invented by the slaughterhouse workers who were paid in offal and figured out what to do with it. The Jewish-Roman kitchen of the Ghetto is the oldest continuous culinary tradition in Europe, four hundred years inside the walls producing dishes that exist nowhere else. The supplì, the fried rice ball with mozzarella that stretches like a telephone wire when you pull it apart, is the street food of a city that has always known how to feed people standing up.

Tuesday night we are not cooking the Rome of the textbook. We are cooking the Rome of the new trattoria, the Rome of Pennestri in Ostiense and Retrobottega near the Pantheon, the chefs who grew up in the Roman kitchen and decided that the most interesting thing they could do with two thousand years of culinary tradition was to listen to it more carefully. Seasonal. Market-driven. Rooted in the cucina povera logic that has always been the city’s greatest strength. The vegetables at the center of the plate. The meat as seasoning, not destination.

The vignarola is Rome in a single pot — fava beans, peas, artichokes, guanciale, white wine, the spring garden and the cured pork cheek cooking together until the broth between them is something neither could produce alone. The rigatoni with sausage, mint, and pecorino is the Roman trattoria updated by someone who grew up eating it. The braised chicken with sweet peppers and tomato — pollo alla Romana — is the Tuesday family dinner that Roman grandmothers have been making since before anyone thought to give it a name. And the chocolate mousse with pane carasau, rosemary, and sea salt is a Pennestri dessert that has no Roman antecedent whatsoever and is completely correct anyway.

I will go to Rome. I will walk past the Pantheon and feel what I should feel and eat the artichokes in the Ghetto and sit in a trattoria in Trastevere at ten o’clock at night when the neighborhood wakes up and drink something cold and watch the city do what it has been doing for two thousand years. In the meantime, I have been cooking from its kitchen without ever standing in it, which turns out to be possible because Rome distributed itself across the entire world a very long time ago and has been impossible to ignore ever since. Fort Bragg on a Tuesday night. Twenty-nine dollars. The father of us all.

Of course, I am wrong about not wanting to go. Rome has been waiting.

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