Rome Day 7 and 8

Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Good morning.
We decided to buy lots of cheese today. Here they are as follows: Pecorella 296 g fir €3.46, Grana Padano 330 g, for €2.94, Formaggio Asiago 446 g at €3.43, Pecorino Nobile 280 g and €2.21 lastly Mandarino Affumicato 208 g at €2.54. We’ll let you know how they are. We just got home from shopping and did we cash in. We bought two bottles of olive oil and one bottle of balsamic vinegar to bring home. We also bought some generic biscuits with cocoa. Along with that, a 1.5 Liter box of sangria followed us home. How bout that?

It was a fun little venture. The grocery store was a bunch of stops away on the metro, but it was about a 15 minute trip. It was part of a mall that included a Coin store. Lisa and I wandered around the mall to see what Italian malls were like. It was pretty dinky compared to most of ours in the states. I would say it was smaller than half the size of the Apache mall. When we were walking around we saw some food shops, particularly one selling pizzas and sandwiches. Lisa and I told ourselves that we would stop later and we did. We ended up getting a huge piece of like a tuna salad (minus the mayo) pizza with lettuce and tomato pieces and a Prosciutto and zucchini pizza. We also got fried zucchini flowers and fried Baccalla (salted cod). The fried flowers had cheese and anchovies and the salted cod was good as well. Not bland like some of the fried fish that I have had in my time. The Tuna Salad pizza was awesome, but I couldn’t finish the Prosciutto pizza, because instead of like melted cheese, they had some sort of liquid cheese or something, and it wasn’t very appealing to me. It just kind of freaked me out. So I left it alone. It was pretty pricey in the mall, because we ended coughing up 14€ for those two pieces of pizza, the fish, the flowers and a diet coke. Ouch. After that we went grocery shopping. After the trek to the grocery store we came home and had a snack of some artichokes. This time we had a total of 3. We sauced them in a bit of oil and balsamic vinegar, salt/pepe (pepper). They were pretty good, a good little snack that I don’t feel horrible about eating. It also served as a break between veggies as we are having salad and minestrone soup and asparagus tonight, it is also hard to cook all that stuff with only 2 burners and no microwave to help share the load.

After our snack we decided to go up to the roof and lay out in the afternoon sun. We laid out and talked for about an hour to an hour and a half. I think it is safe to say I would have been asleep if it were not for the 3 caffe’s we each had. It was warm and still breezy up there. We didn’t break a sweat in the sun which is always nice. I usually am against sun bathing unless a pool is available.

We came back to the apartment and Luke is making the minestrone with real beef and the fresh veg we got from the market yesterday. I’ll get the salads ready in a minute. We MAY go to Piazza Navonna later or we MAY stay in and watch a TV show. Plans for tomorrow are still up in the air. Over and out. ljf

Thursday, May 10, 2007 1754

Good evening. Today we got a moderately late start and went out to re-view some of the things we wanted to see again. We hopped on our good ol’ 116 bus and went to Trevi Fountain.

There still were a good handful of tourists there. We sat for a while in a sunny spot and then moved to a more shady vantage point to people watch. After an hour or more we had had enough of Bernini’s grandest fountain.

We walked around a while half heartedly looking for a place to eat dinner. We knew we needed to eat before our museum entry time at 1500 or we’d likely keel over. We looked in a few take out pre made sandwich places, stopped to look at a few menus posted outside the doors. We were accosted by a the owner of a neighboring restaurant. He said he had real Italian food, not that crap over there. He pulled us in and we looked at some of the food samples he had in cases along the way to the back of the restaurant. We allowed ourselves to be seated. I ordered the Lasagna I saw in the kitchen window it was a lot of layers of noodles with some creamy tomato sauce like they mixed in real ricotta with the warm sauce and it all melted. It was very good but I would have liked more or a side or something. Luke ordered the bucatini which was basically a bacon flavored tomato spaghetti. The spaghetti was really big around. A few of them were hollow in the center. I know cause I felt air when I was sucking the spaghetti into my mouth when I was trying it. It was really good, Luke got a big portion. We also decided to share a Pizza, we had a Margherita. It had a lot of cheese compared to the Naples pizza we had. The bill came to €31 with water and 15% service included. We went to the bathroom and we saw the desserts in the cooler in the basement. They were packaged and purchased from a vendor. They were really pushing the Lemon Sorbet that was served in a hollowed out lemon. Glad we didn’t get it. The people upstairs were taken. The service was really friendly, I can say that much.
We walked to the Spanish steps. There is this little staircase that is parallel to the Span steps, they are more functional than decorative. I said to Luke, “This is it?” We laughed. Oh, another funny thing Luke said when we were touring around the forum previously- he asked “Where is Caesar’s Palace?” Caesar’s palace is Las Vegas. There is no C.P. in Roma. Ha ha. Ok back to the Steps, we sat for a while in the sun, people watched again.
At 1400 we decided to get going for our 1500 entry time to the Borghese gallery. We had Rick’s instructions and the instructions from the Borghese people. We were kind of dumbfounded. We were supposed to go to Via Veneto which didn’t really run in that area from what we could see from our mappa. We decided to go from the Spagna metro stop and try to follow the directions that way. We finally hit the right spot to start from. The signs pointed us to a subway level moving sidewalk and then out to daylight and then to cut through a dog type park over gravel and past a little Carosel and arcade for kids out in the middle of “nowhere” you could also rent bikes to an unseen destination. They had little bikes too for the kiddies, also a 4 person covered bike. That looked kind of cool. We saw some American kids biking and screwing around in one. We finally were sure we were on the right path and saw the museum. We even made it the required 30 min ahead of time to claim our tickets so they didn’t sell them. A sign said at the desk that they were sold out of tickets until Sat. Can you believe. I bet they had lots of pissed off people that when they got all the heck way out there found out that there were no openings until the next day.

We drank some fresh water from the fountain and wetted our faces down before entering the museum as it was in the low 80’s and very sunny.

The museum was packed with great stuff. It had a very high concentration of big names for not being such a huge museum. The admittance was €7.50. We saw first the Paolina Bonaparte lady posed reclining as Venus. That was very beautiful and done by Canova. Then we saw Bernini’s Apollo e Daphne. It is Apollo trying to grope or grab Daphne. She in her escape had begun to turn into ( I don’t know the significance ) a tree. The sculpture is in a twist of motion and their hair and togas are windblown as her fingers grow leaves and toes sprout roots. This was my favorite sculpture.

Next we saw Bernini’s Pluto and Prosperina, a sculpture capturing Pluto trying to take Prosperina to the underworld. She is fighting him and trying ot hit him, he is holding her up and has a strong hand grabbing one of her upper legs. This part looks so real as his fingers are dug in and pressed into her, she doesn’t look marble. This one was Luke’s favorite.

We saw some more Raphaels, Caravaggio’s, Titian, Bernini’s David of which I didn’t get a post card. We saw a room full of rare Porphyry purple marble.

We exited and sat on a sunny park bench, contemplated sunburn, discussed our thoughts on the museum and were dreaming about the cheese plate we were going to make when we got home. Yummy. We luckily found a 116 Electric bus stop and took it directly to our stop in the Campo. We were very happy to be home.

We stopped at the local dry goods store and bought some coffee as we drained the caffé grounds that was provided or left with the apartment. We bought more or we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the AM.

Luke will make some kind of miraculous tomato sauce for the fresh pasta we bought in the store the other day. Maybe we’ll have some garlic toast or something too. I think we ate all our fresh veg yesterday. Oh, wait we can have our favorite salads. Luke also informed me that he would like some tartufo dark chocolate gelato. We had some in Parma. It was SO VERY good. It was so rich and chocolaty, not even terribly sweet, just good. We better get going if we are going to do all those things before bed. Plus I should do dishes too.

Today is Day 8 of 10 in Roma. We leave Monday AM. Luke and I have talked about how we miss our house. This has been the first time we have really talked about missing that. I guess it will be good to be home. Hopefully we’ll have time to post. ljf

We are now having a cheese tasting and I will be doing the documentation. We are eating tralli thin breadsticks and toast.

1.) Nodini mozzarella prepackaged from the fresh case-soft rubbery/chewy, light and cool. Like a wet cheese curd. It needs salt. Kind of flavorless.
2.) Parmigiano Reggiano- you can taste the crystals when you crunch a chunk, a dry and almost crumbly cheese it kind of sucks the moisture out of your mouth. Tastes milky and has some depth
3.) Provolone Piccante Auricchio Spicchio. This one is smooth and slices well. Light ceamy color, it has a bit of spice to it. It almost tastes like vinegar or something acidic in the aftertaste.
4.) Pecorella. Smooth with infrequent small holes in the cheese. It is a bit smokey, slices well, tastes a bit like a standard white cheese, a bit mild.
5.) Pecorino Nobile. This one is a bit rubbery to the tooth, reminds a bit like the Mozz. Luke says it has a very subtle bitter aftertaste- I am not sure I’d call it bitter, maybe the taste blossoms at the end. I very much like it. It also has a few infrequent small holes.
6.) Mandarino Affumicato. Smoky to the smell and taste. It makes me think of a campfire and pleasant memories. Maybe it reminds me of hotdogs. This cheese is soft and creamy a little darker cream color than the other cheeses.
7.) Asiago This is a plain creamy soft cheese that has no real strong characteristics. Luke tells me that this melts very well. It is a good overall cheese that a kid would eat or even a picky eater.
8.) Grana Padano This is cheap Luke tells me. It is in the Parmigano Reggiano family, in that it crumbles and splits similarly, however we feel it lacks the depth in the flavor and the crystallization that the P.R. has. This is a very apt substitute at €8.90 that’s € 5 less a kilo. Hmm. Tastes fine.
9.) Fontina Aosta Inter. Luke doesn’t like this he says it’s bitter. It sure is bitter, wow. It almost tastes basic like it’s poison. I tried it earlier and didn’t think it was that bad. I wonder if the characteristics are just magnified when comparing the cheeses. It is again creamy in color and texture, slices well. Luke would not let us get more of this. I guess I wouldn’t suggest it either. Good thing we only got a bit. This concludes the cheese tasting.