Maybe I wasn't feeling in a very gourmet frame of mind, or maybe I'd been scared off by all the warnings that Rome isn't the place to come for food in Italy, but the main thing I was looking forward to eating while I was there was pizza. I carefully consulted my guide books and the New York Times reader recommendations so as to avoid sub-par tourist traps, and ended up with decent and extremely filling lunches both Friday and Saturday, though not the kind of world-altering pizza I was secretly hoping to find. My first pizza, at Ecce Bombe near Piazza Navonna, was Roman-style, with a paper-thin crust and minimalist toppings - I ordered a Margherita, and it came with just the one leaf of basil in the middle. The crust was nicely blackened and blistered at the edges, and there was olive oil dashed across the cheese on top.
The next day, after waking up jet-lagged at 5:30 and spending all morning at the Vatican Museums, I was in a complete daze, art-drugged and exhausted, by lunchtime, but I still managed to find Amalfi, a Napolitan-style pizza place a few streets from the Vatican. I ordered the pizza funghi, which turned out to be just ordinary button mushrooms. The crust was thicker than my first pizza's, though still nowhere near the chewy density of your standard American pizza, and it too had charred edges and barely-there toppings. It was harder to finish than the other one, though, due to the breadier crust. Also, the waiter propped the door open just behind me and a cold wind was blowing on my back. When I had eaten about a third of my pizza, another lone diner was seated diagonally across from me and struck up a conversation. He told me he was a lawyer from Sicily and was in Rome for business, but that he lived here 12 years. I told him I was a lawyer from Japan, and showed him my Japanese guidebook, especially the Japanese-Italian phrasebook, which I personally found hilarious. I guess you have to be able to read katakana to get much out of it, though. My pizza finished, I left the Sicilian lawyer to his baba au rhum, and was off to St. Peter's for an overdose of renaissance architecture and art.
Maybe I wasn't feeling in a very gourmet frame of mind, or maybe I'd been scared off by all the warnings that Rome isn't the place to come for food in Italy, but the main thing I was looking forward to eating while I was there was pizza. I carefully consulted my guide books and the New York Times reader recommendations so as to avoid sub-par tourist traps, and ended up with decent and extremely filling lunches both Friday and Saturday, though not the kind of world-altering pizza I was secretly hoping to find. My first pizza, at Ecce Bombe near Piazza Navonna, was Roman-style, with a paper-thin crust and minimalist toppings - I ordered a Margherita, and it came with just the one leaf of basil in the middle. The crust was nicely blackened and blistered at the edges, and there was olive oil dashed across the cheese on top.
The next day, after waking up jet-lagged at 5:30 and spending all morning at the Vatican Museums, I was in a complete daze, art-drugged and exhausted, by lunchtime, but I still managed to find Amalfi, a Napolitan-style pizza place a few streets from the Vatican. I ordered the pizza funghi, which turned out to be just ordinary button mushrooms. The crust was thicker than my first pizza's, though still nowhere near the chewy density of your standard American pizza, and it too had charred edges and barely-there toppings. It was harder to finish than the other one, though, due to the breadier crust. Also, the waiter propped the door open just behind me and a cold wind was blowing on my back. When I had eaten about a third of my pizza, another lone diner was seated diagonally across from me and struck up a conversation. He told me he was a lawyer from Sicily and was in Rome for business, but that he lived here 12 years. I told him I was a lawyer from Japan, and showed him my Japanese guidebook, especially the Japanese-Italian phrasebook, which I personally found hilarious. I guess you have to be able to read katakana to get much out of it, though. My pizza finished, I left the Sicilian lawyer to his baba au rhum, and was off to St. Peter's for an overdose of renaissance architecture and art.
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