Rome: A Feast After the Fray
Last year, Canberra local Edwina Hyman shared this wonderful story as part of our 'Tales from Italy' blog competition. Her piece captures the magic of a late-night feast in Rome — a city where good food is always on the menu, no matter the hour...
Rome: A Feast After the Fray
Our re-introduction to Rome was a vexed and stuttering affair, beginning at the Gare de Lyon where the announcement board chanted a rhythmic mantra of ‘en retard, en retard’—a delay that seemed to stretch forever while I stood there, growing increasingly cross amidst the indifference of a station where smoke still curled illicitly from cigarettes crushed underfoot and poor little dogs were dragged through the haze by their owners.
The journey itself offered no respite, for the carriage was a tired, rattling thing that lacked the silent, sleek velocity of the Japanese Shinkansen I so admired; and by the time we had navigated the missed connections and finally boarded the gleaming, efficient Italian train to arrive in the absolute bedlam of Roma Termini, where the tide of departing passengers collided with the weary stream of arrivals, we were utterly spent.
We dragged our cases over the cobblestones to a hotel where the concierge offered us nothing but a bored glance, yet the street outside was alive with brilliant lights, and famished, we collapsed into the first trattoria we saw.
It was there that the day turned. We ordered the zucchini flowers—having seen crates of them stacked like treasure by the entrance—and when they arrived, served on those broad, bold plates that seem to hold the very spirit of Italy, they were a revelation: encased in a batter more generous than we would dare at home, bursting with the sharp tang of gorgonzola and mozzarella which cut perfectly through our exhaustion.
Next came the pasta with artichoke sauce, cooked with that distinct resistance of al dente and dressed with such restraint that the pasta itself remained the protagonist of the dish.
The waiter, a man of infinite relaxation in his crisp whites, insisted we finish with dolce, and though I had intended to share with my husband, asking for two spoons to be brought to the table, the moment the plate landed—rich and perfect against the ceramic—I looked at him and said, “I’ve changed my mind; I want it all,” leaving him to order his own as a sweet, selfish conclusion to a long and difficult day.
