In the US, naturally, I drove to the supermarket. The route led down a pot-holed avenue walled with office buildings. I loaded a cart with a week’s worth of supplies and was home in an hour. I stowed the perishables in the double fridge, the packages in the pantry. Maybe I remembered to feel grateful for the bounty. More likely I resented the patriarchy for taking up my time with unpaid women’s work.
In Rome, food shopping was different. We’d moved there for a few months for my husband’s job. We’d rented a small apartment in the historic centre, near Campo dei Fiori, in a warren of cobbled alleys. We had no car and there was no supermarket, so I spent two hours every three days walking to speciality shops and farm stands. We had only a tiny refrigerator in a kitchen no bigger than a phone booth, so I could buy only a few days’ worth of groceries at a time. I carried them in a backpack and bags that I lugged up four flights to our attic lodging.
The first day I ventured out on my own, I came back within minutes in tears. The streets were such a tangle, I was afraid of getting as lost as Odysseus. The names on the street signs, a jumble of nonsense syllables, didn’t match those I had recorded, and I didn’t have an Italian cell for guidance. I recognized no landmarks in the blur of gaudy old facades, any more than I could distinguish words in the multilingual babble lapping around me. But after a few weeks of prepping with Google Maps and halting to orient myself at every corner, the route became muscle memory. I could think about something other than where I was going. I could look around.
Via Guibbonari, lined with boutiques, was teeming with office workers, families, vendors, barkers, and beggars. The Italians were distinguished from the tourists by their tailored clothing, their upright, easy carriage, and seldom walking alone. Important players strutted in camel’s hair overcoats, leather briefcases, and wingtips; tall, bearded youths, cashmere sweaters tossed over their triangular torsos, ambled in slim black jeans and ankle boots, trailing gusts of cigarette smoke, cologne, and impeccable cool. Women in clothes much sexier than my American cohort wears — low-cut and form-fitting, whatever the form, and ornamented with glitzy costume jewellery — tottered over the uneven cobbles in spike heels. The rare child often wore a costume — a gladiator’s armour, butterfly wings, a tulle princess skirt — and sported a pastry in one hand and a balloon in the other. A retinue of parents and grandparents halted as the little emperor kicked a soccer ball, jumped a puddle, or blew kisses to Mamma. In American supermarkets I’d often averted my eyes from exhausted mothers yelling at their kids, even yanking them around; here the only person I ever saw treating a child harshly was not Italian.
Back home I bought vegetables wrapped in plastic, sliced bread with the texture of pot scrubbers, a brick of gummy cheese, and tomatoes that, like the strawberries, cued memories of flavours they no longer possessed. I bought Styrofoam trays of protein sealed in plastic — a pink block labelled salmon and a yellow one labelled chicken — as clean and uniform as bars of soap. I picked up foods from distant climates — papayas, avocadoes, bananas — and staples of international cuisines — Japanese tofu, Mexican tortillas, Indian teas; maybe I’d throw in a bar of chocolate harvested in Africa and processed in Europe. Maybe I’d note the globalism, but probably not.
In Rome, what I bought was different. Much of the food wasn’t wrapped, because, I supposed, it hadn’t come from far away. Much of it wasn’t available all year; the season for artichokes, for example, was brief. The food didn’t keep, because it wasn’t processed. Nor was it sanitized; it bore the gritty traces of its origins in the earth, the plants that grew from it, the animals that grazed on it, the hands of the people who had prepared it. I could buy boxed, imported, or processed foods as I did in America, but they were tucked in back of a market no larger than a convenience store; they were a sideshow, not the main event. Much as in America, I could go to farmers’ markets or coops for local foods, but they were peripheral, counter-cultural. For the short time I was in Italy, I wanted to experience food that I perhaps erroneously imagined was Italian.
My first stop was the bakery, Roscioli. I learned to insert myself into the crowd pressed up against the glass cases stuffed with glazed tarts, biscotti, and flaky pastries, most of which I couldn’t identify, to claim a clerk’s attention. I would have to navigate three lines — rather, clusters — to order, pay, and pick up. Behind the counter, clerks flew about; here and elsewhere, experts dispensed the food, much as chemists dispensed medications; only in the modern mini-market did you help yourself. Rustic loaves — no plastic bags, no slices — stacked on wood racks exuded yeasty aromas. Did I want to try the whole grain with hazelnuts, the sourdough with olives? The semolina, the maize? By eavesdropping, I figured out how to convey my choice: “Un pane multicereali, per favore, entero.” Multigrain, a whole loaf, though Italians seemed to buy only a quarter or half, as if they bought fresh bread one meal at a time. When the clerk demanded “Poi?”, which meant, I deduced, “What next?”, I learned to approximate “Abbastanza cosi,” meaning enough like that, or “That’s all.” I enjoyed working on my accent, but it, as well as my backpack, sensible shoes, and natural hair, marked me as American as surely as if I’d wrapped myself in the Stars and Stripes. One clerk came to recognize me. “Me,” he announced with an Italian lilt and a chest thump, “five years in Ohio.” A bond.
Then to the little “supermarket,” Punto Simply, a few blocks further, on Via Monte della Farina. I walked in past the fishmonger and his silver fish displayed on crushed ice. I couldn’t figure out his hours; when I came to buy fish, he wasn’t there, but when I hadn’t planned on it, he was. His fish, unlike that at Trader Joe’s, had eyes and fins, mouths and tails. When I asked him to fillet a branzino, he wielded his knife with the showy finesse of a prima ballerina. He presented my paper packet as if it were a gift. With my foreign get-up, I stood out here, too, so he took to bowing as I walked in — Buon giorno, Signora — with a touch to his white clerk’s cap. Perhaps he was wheedling for business, but his pleasure in this courtly gesture struck me as genuine.
I asked my landlady, who spoke English, how I could determine the fishmonger’s hours. (I addressed all such questions to her: Can we drink from street fountains? Where are public toilets? How much laundry fits in that little washing machine? When are the potted tree’s lemons ripe? Answers: Yes, nowhere, a little, and when yellow, of course. I must have seemed as naïve as a child, as clueless as a space alien.) She reminded me that this is a Catholic country, lapsed though it may be. In the churches, the few faithful kneeling in side chapels were outnumbered by tourist hordes gawking at the extravagant kitsch and occasional art in the naves, but people still ate fish on Fridays. If I wanted to buy fish, I should do it then. But sometimes on Thursdays. There was so much to learn.
When the supermarket fishmonger was absent, I detoured to the Attica Fish Market in Piazza Paradiso, although it too had erratic hours that only Italians were privy to. Late one afternoon, the steel trays were empty of all but a few items: splayed wings of skates, giant prawns with spidery antennae, and baby octopi whose tentacles curled around the soft globe of their heads — an aquarium of the dead, whose intact forms challenged my self-serving assumption that my dinner had never been alive. I didn’t know how to cook any of it. Wasn’t there any branzino? The clerk shook his handsome black curls sadly: Not today. Persico? Another sad head-shake. I ran through my limited Italian fish vocabulary: Salmone? No. Gambieri? No. Tonno? Pesce spada? This script was straight Monty Python. So even if the fish store was open, that didn’t mean it had fish. Another conundrum.
Across Piazza Paradiso at the chicken butcher’s, the illusion that dinner originated in plastic trays, rather than in the muscles of living creatures, was equally hard to sustain. A flock of naked yellow carcasses, scraggly necks extended, red combs still jaunty, lay on the catafalque of the counter, next to skinned bunnies and whole anatomy lessons of organs and entrails, some of which looked like soft coral. I asked for chicken breast, petto di pollo, and nodded Si when the butcher, who deduced from my halting request that he’d better stick to gestures, pointed at his own torso and mimed thin-slicing. I’d still have to wrestle out the gristle in the tiny kitchen back home, as well as the stubble of feathers. Meanwhile the cashier lounged off to the side, gesticulating into his cell, when he wasn’t ducking out for a smoke. He’d scrawl a number on a scrap of paper, and I’d count out the unfamiliar bills and coins, without really knowing how much I had paid or what, exactly, I was getting.
Sometimes I braved the jam-packed outdoor market, a tent city that appeared every morning in Campo dei Fiori, a Renaissance square rimmed with restaurant terraces, and vanished like Brigadoon every night. Early mornings we were awakened by the clatter of vendors’ handcarts drawn over the cobbles, as I imagined sleepers had been in ancient Rome. At dusk a squadron of miniature street-sweepers cleared the day’s debris of cabbage leaves, flower stalks, and orange peels. After dark, waves of teen partiers surged through the square. The sequence of working and partying, shopping and dining, salesmanship and courtship, played out under the gloomy gaze of the statue of Giordano Bruno, immolated here in 1600 for refusing to recant his Copernican convictions. A memento, not simply of mori — because, while the players would change, the roles would endure, or so it seemed — but of cruelty, so at odds with the dolce vita swirling all around it.
The market was a kaleidoscope of colours that settled into luscious still-lifes. Sheaves of plump purple artichokes bowing their shaggy stalks. Mounds of oranges with green leaves still attached. Lettuces pale and frilly as Elizabethan ruffs. Eggplants that were white or speckled as well as shiny purple-black. Tomatoes that glowed as if infused with sunshine. I tried to ask in Italian for a half-kilo of oranges. The vendor, cigarette ash dangling, tossed a few into a paper sack before I could vet them, threw them on the scale, and, before the swinging needle had settled, between arguments with his coworkers, pronounced some number. I fumbled with the coins, trusting I hadn’t just been overcharged for substandard fruits that would never be foisted on an Italian. Other stands — bancarelli, an extravagance of syllabic musicality expended on folding tables — sold rainbow pastas, olive oils, honeys, sculpted bottles of limoncello, and mixed spices, all of which we disdained as touristy, as if we were superior to such a designation. In a charcuterie on the periphery, hefty hams, undisguisedly the pig haunches they’d once been, clustered in a herd overhead. The counters were stacked with wheels of promising cheese; a glass case sheltered bowls of creamy ricotta. When asked what kind, I stumbled, unprepared for such refinement; I hadn’t known there was more than one. The nearby butcher shop displayed a diagram of a cow labelled with cuts of meat. No euphemisms here — no London broil or brisket or minute steak, but shoulder or neck or rump. Unappetizing for a squeamish quasi-vegetarian like me, but I could appreciate the candour.
On our first day we had tested the small supermarket together. My husband had helped me figure out how to weigh the produce by setting it on the scale, punching in the code handwritten on the bin, and affixing the printed label to a bag pulled from a roll. Even with this rehearsal, for the first few weeks, I bumbled from selection through checkout, signing the wrong paper thrust at me, returning my basket to the wrong stack, packing up too slowly and holding up the line. Accustomed to shopping by car, I was stocking up for at least a few days, but Italians seemed to buy only a few items at a time. They would exit gracefully, swinging a lone bottle of wine, not burdened like a pack mule, as I would be. The cashier often asked some question I couldn’t decipher, so I defaulted to “Non, grazie.” Maybe she was saying would you like an extra plastic bag for this item, or would you like to have all your groceries for free, or are you a stupid idiot, I just didn’t know.
At first I missed the instinctive sense of the value of money, the meaning of units of measure, the reasonableness of a price. A euro was worth about a dollar and a quarter, and a kilo weighed a little more than 2 pounds. If this cheese I’d just pointed to at the deli counter was €15.50 a kilo, how much did it cost per pound? It was like taking the SATs on the fly. I hadn’t finished my mental math before the busy clerk interrupted with his “Poi?” While walking home I had the leisure to figure, okay, about $19.25 for 2.2 pounds, so maybe $9.75 per pound. I would seldom pay that much for cheese in the US — but it was such fine, flavourful, real cheese, not industrial guar gum, and what else was there to eat here for lunch? Would I get an even better cheese if I paid another five euros a kilo? I had no idea. It was like buying bottles of wine with the labels blacked out.
Then there was the mysterious unit called the etto, or one hundred grams, which I had to use to order deli items. At first it was as foreign as a grit to My Cousin Vinny. I had no points of reference for a gram, much less a hundred of them. Eventually I translated this unit into handfuls — un’ etto was one, due etti two. If I wanted two handfuls of those delicious Greek olives — and I did — I would ask for due etti di olive greche, tapping on the glass above them and cupping my palms. Like the chicken butcher, I trusted gestures more than slippery syllables.
Because all these negotiations over foreign foods and foreign measures were rendered more complex by being conducted in Italian. I was of course smitten with the language; as a cosmopolitan friend had observed, “Other languages talk, but Italian sings.” Unlike Jhumpa Lahiri, however, I wasn’t ready to dedicate twenty years to becoming fluent. In addition to grammar and vocabulary, fluency required mastering the ancillary languages of gestures, colloquialisms, regionalisms, and, apparently, curses. Still, I enjoyed picking out chopsticks on this Steinway grand, even while fearing that with every mangled word I was committing a sacrilege. Eventually I could compose a sentence: If I concentrated, I could get all those slippery words lined up, the articles, nouns, prepositions, and adjectives agreeing in gender and number, the verbs in correct form. But I had to shut out all other stimuli to do so, which was nearly impossible with a clerk impatient to know which of the four kinds of ricotta the American signora had meant — turned out the one I had pointed to was buffalo mozzarella.
I was used to being a semi-competent adult; all this, while interesting — a reason to live abroad, to learn that quotidian routines can take multifarious forms — was also humbling. Eventually I could ask for un pezzo di questo formaggio, a piece of this cheese, but I worried that one vowel off and I’ll be asking for one crazy cheese — pezzo vs. pazzo — or a well of cheese, a pozzo. Who knew what nonsense was coming out of my well-intentioned mouth? But no one ever mocked me or imitated me sarcastically, as had happened in Paris when I’d tested out my schoolgirl French. People made respectful efforts to communicate, holding up fingers to convey numbers, miming portion sizes, even dredging up residuals of textbook English. After all, the subject — food — was a serious one. Accuracy mattered.
While food shopping in the US, I spoke to no one in a way that wasn’t transactional — the corporate script at Trader Joe’s required that the cashier ask “Find everything okay?”, but everyone understood that the question didn’t come from the heart. At Giant Eagle I could scan my own groceries and talk to no one at all. I recognized a few employees in the stores I frequented, but that didn’t mean we would interact. Here in just a few weeks I had come to know the bread-seller from Ohio, the two fishmongers, the deli man who spooned up the olives, and the cashiers at the market and chicken butcher’s. They recognized me, too, as if we were living in a small town. Across the twin barriers of language and culture, we had a few exchanges. One day the supermarket fishmonger reduced a price from 18 to 15 euros — certain rules in Italy being mere suggestions, subject to social considerations. “Un piccolo sconto,” he winked. A small discount. When I told the landlady, she commented, “Now you belong.”
I marvelled at these food professionals. They were so unlike the workers who bagged robotically back at Walmart. Their personalities transcended the cramped physical spaces they inhabited, the limited roles they had to play. They performed their mind-numbing, soul-confining routines with style. With pride in their expertise. Maybe the shops were family businesses, so maybe the employees’ stake in the outcome exceeded that of a minimum-wage earner stocking a big-box back home. Or maybe they took satisfaction from their roles in their communities; evidently they were players in intricate social dramas. Their rote tasks seemed to be leavened by animated conversations on cell phones, with co-workers, with regular Italian customers, to an extent forbidden as slacking off in America. They conversed even while running cash registers. At Giant Eagle, the cashiers’ exchanges seemed limited to “When you getting off work?” Here, whole rivers of Italian flooded by. There seemed to be no hovering boss, no corporate spy passing through checkout in disguise to monitor whether workers were wasting time on chitchat. Here, if the boss was around, s/he was probably running the conversation.
The supermarket cashiers stopped everything when a child appeared. Once a cashier reminded me tartly to step aside so a pregnant woman with a small daughter could move to the head of the line; apparently my faux pas was akin to failing to bow before the Queen or pull over for an ambulance. Skipping up blithely, a little girl in a sparkly red tutu held up netted chocolate Easter eggs for the cashier to admire. An older man abandoned his station in the adjacent office booth to strike up a leisurely flirtation with this little charmer. On another occasion the cashier halted the line for a boy whose face bore traces of a recent encounter with chocolate. He leaned comfortably across her stopped conveyor belt as if a chat were an after-school routine. Who was with him here today? Nonna and Mamma? Very nice. And how did you like your chocolate? What are you doing next? Etc. Only after the relatives came over and indulged in a little more baby talk could the business of checking out the waiting customers resume — none of whom seemed impatient. After all, this was a child.
These professionals engaged in impassioned discussions of the merits of various foods, the angle at which the prosciutto should be trimmed, the way these shrimp should be prepared, how long to poach this cut of salmon. Once a visiting friend and I, waiting in a deli line, watched open-mouthed as the clerk and his customer designed and constructed two sandwiches layer by layer by layer, each of which necessitated debates about pairings and thicknesses. Eventually we gave up waiting and left.
After I had hauled the groceries upstairs and stowed them into the tiny kitchen, I had to organize them into meals. I had purchased almost none of my usual ingredients. No oats, soymilk, raisins, and almonds, as I’d used for breakfast at home. No frozen mango chunks, “power greens,” ginger, and turmeric to blend into a smoothie. No tofu scramble with tamari for lunch; no peanut butter for a quick sandwich. (Life without peanut butter required major adjustments.) I couldn’t sustain my usual Bittman-esque “vegan before 6” routine or the low-fat regimen a doctor had prescribed; in any case, it seemed ridiculous to forego animal fats in the capital of prosciutto, Parmesan, and gelato.
Dinners had to be simple: nothing could be roasted, since we didn’t have an oven. (Was that typical? — Answers conflicted.) The stove had only two burners, so cooking was an exercise in sequencing. There was no counter space, so I could prepare only what fit on the lone cutting board wedged over the sink. A staple dish that we had thought of as Italian back home — diced tomatoes simmered with vegetables — turned out to be no more Italian than chop suey was Chinese; here pasta was served with the merest film of tomato puree. The pasta was the point, not the sauce.
So here is what we did eat:
Breakfast: Slabs of that chewy multigrain, layered with jam and fresh ricotta; espresso boiled in a little macchinetta for my husband, concentrated as rocket fuel, and roast-barley “coffee” milk for me; oranges. Lunch: a plain omelette with olive oil and salt, or fresh ravioli with pesto and parmesan, a salad, a pear with pecorino and chestnut honey. Dinner might be that thin-sliced chicken breast with onions and mushrooms over rice (once I figured out how to prepare the Italian version), or pasta carbonara made with prosciutto, or salmon with pesto, or polpetti, meatballs, purchased ready-made at the butcher’s, over spaghetti filmed with puree — when in Rome — alongside a salad.
These simple foods were so delicious they made us swoon. Conversation ceased as we concentrated on each bite. Every simple thing — an egg, a potato, a tomato, an orange — had so much more flavour than its equivalent back home. We didn’t need fancy kitchen equipment to make ingredients taste good. Cooking became an exercise in not getting in the way.
We often ate outdoors. We packed plates into our American backpacks and mounted the spiral staircase to our rooftop terrace. There we spread a picnic of the good bread with olive oil or pesto, an earthy cheese, silky ribbons of prosciutto, olives that could inspire odes, tomato and cucumber slices, an apple. From under the striped awning, through potted oleander, tea roses, bougainvillea, and the lemon tree hung with the fragrant white blossoms that had succeeded the harvest of yellow fruits, we gazed out over the tiled rooftops of the Eternal City. At first the view consisted of an undifferentiated sea of rippled terracotta, but eventually we oriented ourselves: That way was the Tiber, the Tiber Island, the Ghetto; there was the Ponte Sisto to Trastevere and the Janiculum Hill with its huge Acqua Paola fountain; up there was the Castel St. Angelo across the bridge with flying angels on it; nearer was the elongated oval of Piazza Navona; to the right was the bald pate of the Pantheon; that way was the marble monstrosity dedicated to Victor Emmanuelle and the broken hulk of the Coliseum. We counted five domes, most of which we learned to identity. The big one on the horizon was St. Peter’s; the nearest was St. Andre della Valle. Over there was the gruesomely-named St. Agnes in Agony. Over there was a favourite, the playful spiral atop St. Ivo, ornate as a wedding cake. Across from us a huge flat roof stretched like an elevated meadow, its grass thick enough to nourish cattle. That was the Palazzo Farnese that housed the French embassy, its lofty chambers designed by Michelangelo. Such was the setting for our bread and cheese picnic.
Was this diet “healthy”? These foods didn’t come with labels that touted medicinal qualities; they didn’t market themselves as high-fibre, or rich in omega-threes, or reduced-fat/salt/sugar, or heart-healthy, or low-calorie as the foods in American supermarkets did. It was hard to believe, as I enjoyed the cheeses and prosciutto, that anything that tasted this good could possibly be bad for you. Although I never indulged in such rich foods at home, here I shed a few pounds — probably from all that walking weighted by groceries, but also because I had to eat less to feel satisfied. Each bite was so enjoyable, I didn’t need many of them. Deliciousness, I discovered, was more filling than deprivation. It made me wonder if the American obesity epidemic was caused not only by government-subsidized corn syrup and the prevalence of white bread, fatty meat, fried foods, and sugary sodas, but also by food that had no taste. Many dishes had no more flavour than the wax replicas displayed in Chinese restaurants. Much of American ice cream tasted like chemicals. Maybe you needed a heaping bowlful for flavour to accrue. Here gelato could be served in tiny scoops because even a delicate lick delivered a wallop of hazelnut or chocolate or strawberry. Here people ate pastry for breakfast, pizza for lunch, and pasta for dinner, and I don’t think anybody knew what a “carb” was, but they were not as a rule overweight, much less obese. Maybe Americans kept stuffing themselves out of hunger not for calories, but for flavour.
Pleasure outclassed nutrition here, especially at breakfast. I couldn’t bring myself to buy breakfast pastries at Roscioli for home consumption, only my coarse brown loaf. When at a hotel or café I was served a cornetto alongside a rich cappuccino, I floundered. This wasn’t a meal; this was dessert, and dessert for breakfast seemed an unconscionable indulgence. After all, I had long been married to whole grains and herbal tea. But the decadent confection displayed before me, plump with cream, its buttery curves clad in a lacy negligee of powdered sugar, was brazenly out to seduce. Before its charms, my self-discipline melted like von Aschenbach’s in Death in Venice; besides, there was nothing else for breakfast.
Maybe if I ate it, I’d ingest something of Italy. This frou-frou knickknack passing for a meal seemed of a cultural piece with the extravagant emotionality of opera, the decorative excesses of Baroque, the bling stuffing the cathedrals. It was Catholic sensuality, not Protestant asceticism. It was not a nutrition delivery system like peanut butter on whole wheat, or Fiber One with skim milk and a half grapefruit. It had the same relation to hunger that a ball gown does to nudity. It decorated the morning as curlicues do a church front or flowerpots a balcony. It was the equivalent of bancarella for a folding table, of the ornate church doors; why settle for a plank when you could have bronze bas-reliefs? Why cover your torso with a tee when you could fling a cashmere sweater with the panache of an Imperial Roman draping a toga?
I had decided that Italians were breakfasting on beauty. The day ahead might threaten non-stop frustrations — traffic, bureaucracy, confinement — but here was an interlude in which to savour la dolce vita. But eventually I started to suspect that most Italians weren’t starting the workday with cornettos, any more than they were wearing ball gowns to the office. My evidence: The breakfast aisle at Punto Simply was stocked with packets of rusks. Our landlady had provided one, as if it were a staple we would surely appreciate, like sugar or salt. Each square of this pre-dried toast — how convenient, we joked, it’s already stale — had the texture of plywood and about as much flavour; maybe it was useful as a platform for butter and jam, or as a Brillo pad for scrubbing last night’s excesses. But I guessed that the difference between the tourist breakfast of cornetto and cappuccino and the at-home breakfast of boiled rocket fuel and a dry biscuit represented the difference between the performed Italy and the actual Italy, between the Italy of Airbnbs in the stage set of the historic centre and the realities unfolding within the concrete apartment blocks that had proliferated on the periphery.
What did most Italians eat? How did they shop? Were the clientele in Punto Simply buying only an item or two because they had already loaded up the Fiat at a suburban mega-mart? I couldn’t get out of the tourist bubble to find out. Like Truman, I was trapped in the show. I had contact with few citizens, mostly my husband’s colleagues. I peppered them and my patient landlady with as many questions as politeness permitted, but I never could be a fly-on-the-wall in one of those countless concrete apartments, never could observe the inhabitants swallowing breakfast before dashing to the office. I knew vaguely about contemporary struggles: the stagnant economy, the shortage of jobs and affordable housing, government corruption and incompetence, the flood of refugees, the exodus of middle-class children seeking opportunities abroad. The actual conditions of Italian life might be as unappetizing as those unadorned hunks of cow at the butcher’s, but how could I really know? I was like one of the blind men in the parable, trying to deduce the nature of the elephant from whatever segment of tusk or trunk or leg lay within my limited reach.
How accurate were my suppositions? Were the cheeses and prosciuttos as handmade as they seemed, or did they come from a giant factory? Was the produce local as I thought, or did it arrive on trucks and ships from the vast reaches of the European Union? I’d been consuming olive grechi without considering what grechi implied. Where did the fish originate? Certainly none of the salmon we’d been enjoying with pesto had ever swum in the lukewarm, polluted Mediterranean. The pesto tasted fresh, but where had the deli obtained basil leaves in February?
Indeed, how representative was my experience of food shopping in Rome? Was walking among speciality shops for artisanal foods a typical routine — or a quaint relic of a vanished way of life? I had cobbled together stereotypes and images from Fellini’s Roma: Every day nonna filled a market basket of farm vegetables for her extended family. That night they would feast al fresco at long tables covered in red-checkered cloths, passing brimming bowls of her homemade pasta and straw-covered bottles of Chianti, maybe even getting up to do a little jig to an accordion. I never actually saw such things in Rome, but that didn’t stop me from feeling, as I myself sat at a red-checkered table, that I was participating in such an experience. This resilient fantasy persisted, even as I was surrounded by German and Chinese tourists, even as I watched Italian office workers beyond the café terrace down slices of pizza while leaning on the rim of a fountain. It persisted despite my knowing that there was little space on the timeline for it: Before modernity brought most Italians out of the fields and into offices, there was Fascism and war, and before that, poverty, so appalling and widespread that millions had fled to America, or died.
I watched the other visitors thronging the market in Campo dei Fiori, sampling oils and honeys, forking up pre-cut cubes of gorgeous fruits. We were all food shopping in Rome, but what exactly were we hungry for? Yes, the food itself was delicious and nourishing. It fed us in a way that a Happy Meal — the name cynically Orwellian — never could. Back home too many people were eating alone from paper bags in front of the television. We came here because we were hungry not only for real cheese and vine-ripened tomatoes and olives from a tree rather than a jar, and not only for the pleasure and beauty, for the art and history, that Rome offers its casual visitors in lavish abundance. We came not only for food that tasted like food, but for food that signified family and community and traditions, even if they weren’t our own. Even if they might never have existed in the forms in which we imagined them.
Yet perversely, we hungry tourists had, like swarms of locusts, consumed that which drew us here: In search of authentic Italy, we had driven out the Italians, who now rented out their ancestral footholds in the historic centre, while they decamped for distant modern buildings with elevators and balconies on which to string laundry. My landlady lamented that Rome was “no longer authentic.” The shops on the key-makers’ street didn’t sell keys; they sold cat calendars and postcards of the Pope. The outdoor market wasn’t for everyday shopping; those bags of rainbow pastas were for tourists to take home as souvenirs, not for nonna to dish out as her descendants argued and gesticulated.
Eventually I realized that we tourists lounging at café tables were being invited to participate, like the children dressed up as gladiators or princesses, in a giant pretend game. The Italians, eager for tourist dollars, and perhaps longing to perpetuate such fantasies themselves, had obliged by creating theme parks, like the home-style restaurants in our neighbourhood, or agriturismos furnished with grandfather clocks and lace curtains where we rootless cosmopolites could imagine ourselves landed aristocrats. It was wholesome fun. But more than that — I could use it, I thought. Use it to find out what makes people happy. I might never understand the complex realities of Italian life past or present, but I could analyze tourist fantasies of it, including my own. I could thereby discover nutrients that life in my bounteous corner of America, overflowing with material comforts, did not provide, even for a white middle-class fortunate like me. That part was real. And it was, I reminded myself, crucial to distinguish fantasy from reality. More crucial than knowing which kind of ricotta to buy, or how to get good oranges from a vendor. But that’s not a popular position. Bruno had been martyred for insisting on it.
*****
By the end, we were tired of it. Tired of lugging the groceries. Tired of cooking on two burners. Tired of the limited rotation of foods. Tired of how every restaurant was Italian. We craved Thai, Mexican, pancakes, sushi. We were tired of being appreciative, tired of feeling clueless. The weather was getting hot, the streets filling up with tourists. The walk from Piazza Navona to the Trevi Fountain teemed like an ant colony. The line at Frigidarium, our favourite gelateria, stretched down the block. It was no longer “our” Rome, as it had become in winter, before the invasions of barbarians like ourselves. We were ready to go home.
Even before we landed, we were struck by the Brobdingnag scale of everything. The New York skyline glittered like a cosmos. The oceanic New Jersey Turnpike seethed with SUVs and monster trucks. In the multitudes surging through the canyons of Newark Airport, many people, even children, were swollen with fat. The hotel must have had a thousand rooms. The king-size bed was so huge we could barely find each other in it. As if in compensation for dwarfing us, the management supplied luxuries — thick towels and washcloths, a plethora of toiletries, heaps of pillows — unheard of in the pensioni we’d frequented.
The mists of familiarity having temporarily dissolved, we were also struck by the colour-coded caste system: Nearly all the people buying services were white, while nearly all the service providers were black or Hispanic — the baggage check-in workers, the security scanners, the shuttle bus driver, the check-in clerks, the hotel construction workers, the slow waiters in the restaurant. In Italy, everybody with whom we had transacted was Italian; there might have been brown-skinned migrants out of sight in the restaurant kitchens, and a lovely Romanian cleaned the apartment, but Italy was not a rainbow nation divided into stripes. Or rather, it was, or had been, but we could not detect them, any more than we could the remnants of regional dialects.
We also noticed, as we would not have before, an absence of la bella figura, of beautiful gestures. Once in Punto Simply, an elderly gentleman in a double-breasted overcoat had bowed to invite me to step ahead to order my pesto; I couldn’t imagine such chivalry here. There was a shortage of gentlemen in overcoats; the travellers around us had dressed for their own comfort in sportswear — which, after our immersion in Italian style, seemed cheap and ugly — or in flamboyant assertions of individuality, rather than to integrate into social relations. But even more striking was this absence of courtesy that wasn’t canned. In the airport and the hotel, employees did their jobs, but they looked askance, slurred their words, emanated boredom or fatigue, which, given the realities of life on minimum wage, without a social safety net, amid pervasive racism, was totally understandable. Yet in Italy, maybe because we’d been dealing with family businesses rather than corporations, people even when performing repetitive tasks presented themselves with dignity. How much weight to give these impressions? Once again, I was blindly groping an elephant. At least, back in America, I could recognize the enormous beast whose nature I was struggling to understand.
For our first meal back in the US, a hotel breakfast, we had to pay $15 each for supersized portions of rubbery eggs and oily patties of shredded potatoes, still frozen in the centre.
Back in our house — modest by American standards, but which now, with its four burners and oven, seemed palatial — I had to restock the refrigerator. Back into the car, roomy and air-conditioned, as was the store. I didn’t have to work out what to say in advance, not only because I was again immersed in my native language, but because there was no need to talk to anyone. The systems were familiar and efficient: I could get everything in just one store; I did not have to weigh my own fruits and vegetables and print the labels; I did not have to wait in three lines to buy bread. The food was plentiful beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors, and affordable. In the perpetual sunshine and controlled climate of the vast food warehouse, everything that grew at any time all over the globe was available: Hawaiian pineapples. Indian mangoes. New Zealand lamb. Arctic salmon. Autumn apples in summer, spring greens in winter. Artichokes year-round. I pushed my cart up and down aisle after aisle; the other shoppers, also solitary, averted their eyes; some talked to invisible auditors via their phones. Most food was packaged. I knew that it wouldn’t have the flavour of my Italian purchases.
I didn’t have to pay much attention to any of it. Not only were the routines as second nature as the language, there was little for my imagination or curiosity to latch onto. The environment seemed as sterile as a lap pool after the ocean. In Rome I walked down the cobblers’ street to the barrel-makers’ street and imagined the artisans of yore working at their trades. I could critique the fashion parade, the artful displays in the little shops. I could learn Italian from signs and listening. I could study the architecture from periods stretching back two thousand years — an Imperial column here, graceful against the sky; a curvaceous Baroque church there; a Renaissance beam over there. I could meditate on the complexities of history, shudder at the violence that underlay the rich urban scape I was passing through, almost hear the crunch of bones underfoot. I could lament the graffiti, the trash, the audacious gulls, the deafening roar of the Vespas. I could break my heart ineffectually over the desperate migrants, the squatters, the begging amputees. I could compare the labourers towing handcarts to Campo dei Fiori to those of two thousand years ago. Food shopping was still unpaid women’s work, and it, like other domestic chores in a land devoid of dryers and dishwashers, was so time-consuming that many Italian women had to forego careers or children. But for me, food shopping in Rome was also an immersive cultural outing, like going to a museum. Back home, for better and worse, it wasn’t; once again I could think about something other than where I was and what I was doing.
We tried having toast with ricotta and jam for breakfast, but we were back to pot-scrubber bread, and the ricotta, part-skim from a plastic container, was grainy and slightly sour. The jam tasted of sugar, not fruit. I could have put on my backpack, walked to the bakery, and bought good bread. But I didn’t. It seemed too expensive, though I paid more in Rome. It seemed too time-consuming, though I spent more in Rome. Here I often read the news over breakfast, then a book over lunch. I don’t gaze out at a sea of terracotta tile beyond the flowers, or close my eyes to savour every bite. I could make food matter more here, but I have more important things to do.
Rome, Newark, Pittsburgh, 2018
Judith Sanders’ poetry collection In Deep was published by Kelsay Books. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Pleiades, Calyx, The American Scholar, and Modern Language Studies; on the websites Vox Populi, Humor Darling, and Full Grown People; and in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She has a B.A. in literature from Yale, an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in English from Tufts. She taught English at universities and independent schools, and in France on a Fulbright Fellowship. She lives with her family in Pittsburgh.
