In The Eternal City, award-winning food and travel journalist and writer Maria Pasquale brings to life the tastes and smells of Rome with every recipe.
My love affair with Italy started over 30 years ago …
Like all love affairs, it has been exhilarating, exciting and passionate. There have been ups and downs, and times we even almost called it quits. I was born to Italian parents in Melbourne, but I somehow knew Italy was my destiny. The indelible ties I have to Italy have been ingrained in me since I was a child, nurtured as a teen, and have ultimately defined me as an adult.
When I first moved to Rome, I knew food would continue to play an important role in my life, but I didn’t know just how much. In a country famous for its food, Rome boasts a fascinating and unique cuisine that is intrinsically tied to its history. Cucina Romana is founded on the principles of cucina povera, literally ‘poor food’, traditionally consumed by the lower classes, and influences from Ancient Rome through to more recent events are reflected in the food culture of the Eternal City today. Given the passionate nature of Romans as a people, it’s no wonder dining is taken pretty seriously. From carbonara recipes to artichoke-frying techniques, just about everything food-related is up for discussion and causes much debate in Rome and, of late, around the world.
As I started to unravel and uncover her secrets, Rome revealed herself to me as a modern-day marvel of a city. This open-air museum has seen centuries of emperors and popes, political and artistic movements, triumphs and tragedies. It is a city where the past and present sit side by side and interact in a painfully beautiful, yet often complex, kind of way. My neighbourhood, Trastevere, is what film-set backdrops are made of. For me it has been a blank canvas that I have begun to colour and design with my own story; my very own Roman Holiday that became a reality.
My stories and memories of the past decade are inherently tied to all of these places and people. Collectively they make up the fabric of my life in Rome – a city and people of contradictions. A place where vintage Fiat 500s are parked alongside Smart cars on the streets of Trastevere, where nuns and monks walk through St Peter’s Square talking on their iPhones or even with selfie sticks, where corruption and a generosity of spirit coexist, where Vespas zoom by the Colosseum, and where, through the window of a taxi, you see police directing Piazza Venezia’s ridiculous traffic in the shadow of the Roman and Imperial Forums.
This city is eternal because it’s full of layers, dynamic and ever-changing, but always the same.
It’s never-ending.
Would you like to know more? Pick up a copy of The Eternal City by Maria Pasquale. Published by Smith Street Books and distributed by Thames & Hudson Australia, available where all good books are sold, RRP $55
