Taste of Southern Italy Delicious Recipes And a Dash of Culture

LAZIO As we cross over the sweet, southern Tuscan flanks into the region of Lazio, we must trim our expectations. Light thins, impressions narrow, and the silvered rhapsody of Tuscany smudges into the blacks and greens and browns of the humble countryside of the Alto Lazio. Pastures and sheepfolds separate sandy-eyed villages sleeping through time. Some of them, rich with untrumpeted pasts unhunted by travelers, are hemmed by Etruscan necropoli, tombs excavated, preserved, beckoning small, whispered ingress into an elegant and precocious culture. The city of Tarquinia, the villages of Sorano, Sovana, Pitigliano, Sutri, Vetralla, Nepi, Civita Castellana, and Tuscania hold up smoked looking glasses into the essentially impenetrable story of Etruria. And then there is Rome. An ecstasy of secrets wrapped in lies and dreams is Rome. The ages ache in our throats as we float on her memories. Raised up from pagan huts huddled on wooded hills, Rome is the sublime issue of grinding wills and destinies dyed in blood, and into her earth are planted the most splendid conceits of power and beauty. Know them, touch them all, and still you shall not know Rome. One can recount her story, trample over her breastnever touching her heartfeel the shifts of her mood shivering one's skin. Still you shall not know her. Look up at her. See a splendid ruin of the Republic containing a medieval church that, in its turn, was re-dressed for the Renaissance, then persuaded into the Baroqueone springing, tumbling forth from anotherin an unfading rhythm of resurrection from spoils. If you search her well, she will give up to you some shard of her mystery. But never mistake her smile for transparency. It is enough, I suppose, that we are of her, of her crooked, confounding descendance of demons and heroes and saints. Perhaps, then, it is first our own shams and treacheries we must loosen, all the better to illuminate her. It helps to approach Rome as an innocent. Even Romans will tell you they know only the places of her in which they live, where they walk, where they buy bread and take coffee and go to Mass. Pieces of her enchant them as they do us. Yet she is not a crumbled and ornamented old dame to be held gingerly, unclose, as if she were only her unembraceable stones. Rome is new and young and becoming, she is of kindness and possibility. Guileless midst the improbable drape of her ruins, she is gold-dusted and bewitching, engaging life, daring it, ravishing every bittersweet crumb of it. A morning in March offers a walk to the Teatro di Marcello and a nearby temple dedicated in 431 b.c. to Apollo. Pediments, pilasters, remnants of the Empire are the precious litter strewn about the wooded patches of weeds and grasses. And there among them is one taking the sun. Her headrest is a fragment of marble column, supine, lustrous in the grass. Unself-consciously pivoting her amplitude under the cupolas of black pine and oleander, she bathes her face in unshaded heat. A string bag filled with nodding, long-stemmed artichokes, and lavender roses waits beside her on the smoothed stump of another stone. In a single one of her moments, she has gathered up to her the sunlight, artichokes, roses, and some quiet, undesigned reckoning with her past. She is, after all, a Roman and would have nothing less. Go at nine of a morning to a bar in Piazza Sant' Eustachio to drink Rome's best coffee, and standing there with you, upholstered in cashmere and Scottish tweed, lips powdered in sugar from his custard-filled croissant, will be a prince. Too, you will find the neighborhood's respected carpenter, a seller of rare books, a restorer of antiquated furniture, two chefs in crisp whites, a wine merchant, and, as dramatic tint for the proscenium, there will be a revolving brDe Blasi, Marlena is the author of 'Taste of Southern Italy Delicious Recipes And a Dash of Culture', published 2006 under ISBN 9780345487230 and ISBN 0345487230.