gardens during loading and unloading, and once a year, they were obliged to clean the riverbed. Numerous laws and regulations administered by the state reflect the importance of the mills to feed the whole city. For example, among them was one that prohibited the requisitioning of horses in service to and from the mills.49
The bakers, or fornai, belonged to another guild. The weight of the bread was set by law, and the charter of 1481, still preserved at the headquarters of the Confraternity of Bakers in Rome, imposed a boycott on mills that “replace or ruin the flour” by adding nonwheat flour. The bakers were not allowed to sell bread to osteria operators or to caporali (“corporals,” who were obliged to buy from special military bakers), and bread could not be baked on Sunday.
Bread was always one of the principal components of the common people’s meals, and some simple bread-based recipes still exist in the cooking of Rome and Lazio. “Interpreted,” as modern cooks say, and embellished, their popularity as the opener of a typical Roman meal, and sometimes much more, is growing steadily. We speak of course of the celebrated panzanella, humble pancotto, and the now ubiquitous bruschetta.
The humble slice of chewy Roman bread, toasted, rubbed vigorously with a clove of garlic, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil right from the press (frantoio), and sprinkled with salt lay long forgotten. On the rare occasions that anyone made it, it was as a snack, or for children, and in any case was more suited to country houses, where it could be easily made by toasting the bread in the fireplace. Bruscare means simply “to toast.”
Today it is back in fashion. There is not a trattoria or restaurant, however smart, that does not serve some type of bruschetta as an antipasto. In other words, bruschetta has become the acid test of the gourmand’s boundless imagination—though sometimes perhaps excessive or misguided. That humble slice of bread laden with such varied toppings and sauces has lost all sense of its poor origins, but in compensation it has risen to the honors of the most tasty and recherché recipes.
Pasta, however, at least ready-made dry pasta in the imaginative shapes we know today, has been around for centuries, but its broad diffusion dates only to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when machines and industrialization, and the lower prices that followed, aided its spread all over the country. There is no doubt that, quite early and not only in Rome, every housewife every day kneaded water and flour to make the dough that, cooked in a vegetable soup, would be the main dish of the daily menu.
Homemade pasta50 has been handed down with the generic name of maccheroni, but the infinite variety of shapes ranges from gnocchetti and small fusilli to thin fettuccine and spaghetti. Already in the sixteenth century, Rome had its University of the Spaghetti Makers (guild of vermicellari), which means that the production and sale of pasta was already widespread there among the middle classes. Pasta sellers opened their shops in the area around the Pantheon, where their memory endures in such street names as Via dei Pastini and Via delle Paste.
Before the tomato was widely consumed, even by the poorest residents—a phenomenon that dates from the end of the 1700s—pasta was dressed almost exclusively with grated pecorino cheese or fried pork fat, with perhaps the help of garlic or onion or herbs. The survivor of that type of seasoning in Roman tradition is the famous battuto, a base for sauces made of pork fat, onion, and herbs, which is used to add flavor to nearly all the ancient soups of Lazio.
Rarely could the poor afford the luxury of egg pasta, though it was quite common among the leisured classes. Beginning in the seventeenth century, culinary texts speak of angel hair, capelli d’angelo, a type of egg pasta cut too thin for human hands ever to have made it. These were, in fact, the specialty of certain nuns, whose convents often sent them as gifts to new mothers or to sick members of important families with a rather curious ceremony. An important scholar of things Roman, Gaetano Moroni,51 gives an amusing description. The bearers of the precious gift, preceded by the families of the nobles, ramrod straight in their elaborate uniforms, marched ahead of the gift: “And immediately afterward, brought in by numerous bearers, one saw towering the ‘pavilion of the new mothers,’ that is, a grandiose machine with bizarre designs, entirely covered with long threads of tagliolini or other egg pasta, the whole surrounded by a swarm of capons and hens for the use of the illustrious patient.”
Also well established at the time was the custom of offering a plate of pasta to the masons who had reached the roof of a house under construction. This curious practice is still alive and well in the towns of the Roman hinterland: when the last tile is placed on the roof, the Italian flag is raised and the owner makes a hearty lunch for the workers.
We must stop to talk about one of the most famous pasta dishes in all Italy, the celebrated pasta all’amatriciana. The dish takes its name from the town of Amatrice, where all the inhabitants are aficionados of their gastronomic monument. Today it has become a mainstay of the popular Roman kitchen, but to make it exactly right, never use pancetta in place of guanciale, which has a much more delicate flavor. The quantity of tomato, which was added later, as its use became more common, is just as important, since the pasta should be colored only light red. The types of pasta to use are bucatini or spaghetti, period.
Polenta is another important dish in the region’s kitchen. Cornmeal was a late arrival on the Roman gastronomic scene. Shepherds brought it from Abruzzo, as food for the transhumance, and even today it is still less common in the capital than in the towns of the hinterland, toward Rieti to the northeast and Latina to the southwest, where it was introduced by the peoples of the Veneto who came to populate the Pontine area after the marshes were drained.52
The Romans make polenta with finely ground yellow cornmeal, and they give it an almost creamy consistency. They serve it with various sauces—such as sugo d’umido, sugo finto, and others—but their favorite is with sausages and pork rinds, which today can be tasted in numerous towns of the Roman countryside.
Rome and Its Gardens
Green spaces were an important feature of the Roman cityscape until the founding of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 (Rome became its capital only in 1870). Most such spaces were parks, but some were kitchen gardens and vineyards. There was plenty of water: in addition to the Tiber, Rome was traversed by numerous marrane, or streams, which were canalized and used for irrigation. The largest marrana, known as the Marrana, began in the Castelli (the hill towns south of Rome), ran outside the city walls at the Via Appia, and emptied into the Tiber, after passing under the Via Ostiense at the Basilica of Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls. Another one, the Aqua Crabra, ran along the walls outside the Porta San Giovanni, entered the city under the Caelian Hill, ran along the Circus Maximus, and emptied into the Tiber at the Temple of Hercules Olivarius (formerly believed to be of Vesta), where it fed a spring.
Water deviated for irrigation often wound up invading the streets, which thus became bogs. But by the end of the sixteenth century, a law attempted to impose order on the deviation of water by prohibiting drawing water without the authorization of the consuls, on penalty of a fine of fifty gold scudi and three lashes. Drinking water was sold in the street and was delivered to homes by water carriers. To quench their thirst during the summer, in addition to the fontanelle, or small street fountains, still a feature of the city today, passersby could, for a few coins, buy a glass of water flavored with a couple of drops of lemon juice from the acquafrescaio (the cold-water man), who kept it cool in special ice-filled containers.
During the Renaissance, “gardens” also came to mean green spaces owned by literary figures or artists, which became the headquarters for learned gatherings. Far from the pomp of the courts, humanists met in a serene green setting to dine and discuss arts and letters. Among the most celebrated gardens was that of Messer Coricio, near the Piazza della Cancelleria, frequented by the most illustrious humanists and men of letters of the sixteenth century, such as Cardinal Bembo, Paolo Giovio, and Pomponio Leto. The famous garden of Jacopo Sadoleto,
