was built as part of an architectural competition and is well-known in the area – it was built and is used as public housing. It has the usual washing hanging from many of the windows and the occasional yelling match being conducted in or around it. Yet down a circular drive, off the street, almost into the bowels of the building, there is a small, average-looking door that you may not immediately recognise as a restaurant.
You will only find it if you stop while walking past one day and notice there is a small sign on the fence of the public building that says Er Timoniere (Roman dialect for ‘the boat driver’) and then you ask your husband what it means, and your husband tells you, and then you wonder why there is a sign saying ‘the boat driver’ on the outside of a building. Unless you walk towards a door at the bottom of the building that is lit up, even though your husband is dragging you back, saying, ‘Don’t go down there, it’s probably someone’s house,’ then you would probably never find it.
This has been confirmed by the fact that several neighbours who have lived across the road from it most of their lives have never heard of it, and that most Saturday nights, if out walking, my husband and I get asked for directions from people who are standing in front of it.
So we book a table and head to Er Timoniere as my reward for fighting off jet lag. Inside, it first strikes you as a dining room in a private house. If you arrive at 8pm, which we mostly do even though it is considered incredibly early by Italian eating standards, the cook’s husband and co-owner is usually still eating his meal in front of the television, on a sofa chair with a tray in front of him. We are generally the first there if we book for 8pm, and we spend time exchanging a few friendly words to our hosts, who know us well by now. The restaurant is partly underground so there is not much natural light, the décor stems from around the 1960s and there are no matching plates or cutlery. It is brightly-lit and small. There is an original restaurant beer fridge from the sixties along one wall, ancient prints and photos on another wall, a display of fruit and vegetables in front of a large mirror and a kitchen the size of a small fishing vessel.
The co-owner/cook, and her family who wait on you, prepare every meal individually, which means the food doesn’t come out at the same time. The wine, water and delicious bread tide you over though. The restaurant fills up quickly and stays full until midnight, with patrons that range in age from eighteen to seventy. Loud conversations and big groups are the norm here and they are all welcomed and treated as though they are family.
I order my rigatoni amatriciana and the waiter jokes with me, ‘Just for a change huh?’ When it arrives, before my husband’s dish, I enfold the bowl in my arms, croon to it and sniff its wafting odours, anticipating the goodness it will instil in me once I can no longer see it. It is my ‘welcome back to Italy’ present, my jetlag/hangover cure-all, my tonic for the heartaches of modern living. I have tried to analyse it, to take it apart bit by bit and study the ingredients, to isolate perhaps a key one, to logically be able to answer why it has these effects on me.
Is it the warm, tangy olive oil? Is it the bite-size, chewy chunks of cured pork from Tuscany? Is it the liberally sprinkled, aged sheep’s cheese, or the home-dried chillies that I can faintly taste? I don’t know which it is, but all together they sate my soul and remind my body that the earth is full of good things. Whenever my mother-in-law cooks for me it has the same effect. I think that these women cook with love, that you can taste it in the food and is the reason why you feel so exceptionally good when you eat it.
Rigatoni are short cylinders of pasta. They are cooked al dente, meaning that they are quite chewy and not at all soft. They are ribbed and hollow, perfect for the tomato-based amatriciana sauce to cling to. The tang of the tomato in the sauce is so deep that it almost tastes of the earth. Its concentrated flavours go right to the bottom of my stomach and start warming me from my feet up. My ills and worries start to float away and I emit little groans between each mouthful, to my husband’s curious delight. My worries now are new. Do I eat one rigatoni at a time to make it last longer or do I put two on my fork and have a double delight each time? How can I scoop up enough oil and at least one piece of deliciously salty smoked guanciale (pig’s cheek) with each forkful? How can I stop my husband from nabbing any, poised with his fork, watching me from across the table?
A typical Italian meal includes a course known as an antipasto, a pasta dish (il primo), some meat, fish or cheese (il secondo) and vegetables (la vedura), and some dessert (dolce) and possibly some fruit or cheese (frutta o formaggio). In my youth, when I first came to Italy, I could do it all, all five courses. I was a lot lighter and generally a lot hungrier, having often to ration my food intake due to finances.
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The second dish of my welcome back to Italy meal is only a vegetable dish, as it is all I can fit in. Luckily, here in Italy vegetables are never disappointing or boring. I order cicoria which has no equivalent in English and which I have never seen in Australia. It is a dark green, bitter, leafy vegetable which one elderly Italian gentleman once described as ‘medicinal’. The cook here prepares the cicoria ‘ ripassata’, which means that after boiling it, it is re-cooked in a saucepan of hot olive oil, shot through with garlic and chillies. It comes to the table soft, salty, caressed by oil and with the flavours of garlic and bitter greens being borne upon a faint sting of chilli. This time bread must be used as well. It may seem strange to order nothing but a plate with one type of vegetable on it, but eating this cicoria feels as decadent as a freshly baked chocolate lava cake.
There is no room or time for dessert. I have reached the limit of my boundaries. I stumble back across the road, almost blind from jet lag, but with the rest of my body zinging from the absorbed love of the meal. The indigo spring air greets me and I raise my head to take in the twilight scent of jasmine. The first long, flat surface to lay down on I have seen in two days awaits me, and I am guided into sleep by Er Timoniere, the boat driver.
Chapter 2
Cara Garbatella, darling Garbatella
You know you’ve been in a city a long time when you can tell, just by the way the wind blows, that rain is coming. I realise I have been here a long time when this happens to me one day.
Romans often ask me how I came to live in Rome. I am always slightly apprehensive about the answer because it doesn’t include having a job to come to, Italian heritage, a man or being shipwrecked. In short, none of the rational or more commonplace reasons for ex-patriots choosing to live here. The reason I came to live in Rome is that, during a visit, I fell in love with it. It was actually love at first sight. I had no warning or prior inkling, and within three days of arrival I was making plans to enable my love and I to remain together, for at least another month. I was prepared to do anything to remain, to experience even just a few more glorious days together. That was seventeen years ago.
I never need to be apprehensive, however, when I answer the question about how I came to live in Rome. Generally, Romans just nod their heads understandingly. I live in a community of people who are passionately in love with their city and proud of it. It is a community that thinks it completely natural for someone from the other side of the world to fall in love with it too. I know it does not have the same effect on everyone, though. I put the world into two categories: those who fall in love with Rome within three days and those who do not. I cannot relate to the second category and prefer not to know those people.
Like many backpackers I had met en route to Rome during my five months of travelling around the Mediterranean, I had become feverish and desperate. I had spontaneously and ridiculously found love, my other half, my soulmate, and a million miles away from my proscribed home. Of course, most of the feverish and desperate backpackers I had met in similar circumstances were having this reaction to a person. But being quite determined that my life would be spent single, and knowing that I
