seven hills, the Aventine,2 which were in turn restocked from the salt marshes at the mouth of the Tiber.
Even the common people’s kitchen enjoyed the effects of contact with Greek civilization and trade with the East. The Sabine hills, northeast of Rome (bordering present-day Abruzzo), came to be covered with olive trees, and the use of olives and olive oil was introduced. To this day, the oil produced there is one of Italy’s best.
By the height of the empire, the middle and upper classes were consuming more meat. But in the countryside, people went on as before and continued to eat simply, relying above all on homegrown fruits, legumes, and vegetables.
In the Middle Ages, the struggles among baronies caused hard times, including famine, in Rome and Lazio, both city and country.3 The splendid gardens that had adorned houses within the city walls under the empire were converted to the growing of vegetables. These kitchen gardens contributed to feeding the people of Rome until the mid-nineteenth century, when they were swallowed up in the building frenzy that accompanied the arrival of the Kingdom of Italy.
With the Crusades, contact with the East was reopened. The tables of the rich became laden with such exotic products as sugar, spices, and oranges, all of them imported by the maritime republics (Genoa, Venice, Pisa, and Amalfi), which dominated trade in their day, and not just in the Mediterranean. But unlike them, Rome remained highly conservative in its cuisine and anchored in tradition. Romans continued to make their sweets with honey and ricotta, to make their wine with the grapes grown in their own vineyards, and to cook their vegetables, fish, and meat in lard, guanciale, or olive oil.
For centuries to come, the population of Rome was only a few tens of thousands. Cut off from the political scene and its troubles, the people continued to live and cook simply, bringing in most of their food needs from the various surrounding zones that today form the region of Lazio—Tuscia and Sabina4 to the north, Campagna to the south, and Marittima,5 or coastal area. The rural population and the people in the small surrounding towns had thus maintained and cultivated a cuisine that remained very close to that of the city: a roast kid cooked near Sora, in southern Lazio, or one in Amatrice, at the region’s northern tip (and formerly in Abruzzo), differed little from what was eaten in Roman homes. For this reason, many of the recipes in this book can be considered as belonging to the region as a whole.
The same holds for pasta: poverty and imagination lay behind the proliferation of all the many types that changed name from town to town: the stracci of one become fregnacce of another, and the Sabine frascarelli differ little from the strozzapreti of the Ciociaria, the region’s southern hinterland. The popular imagination gave whimsical names to the simple paste of water and flour, and only rarely eggs, worked with the hands or with small tools. Thus we have cecamariti (husband blinders) and cordelle (ropes), curuli, fusilli (also called ciufulitti), frigulozzi, pencarelli, manfricoli, and sfusellati, as well as strozzapreti (priest stranglers), the lacchene of the town of Norma and the pizzicotti (pinches) of Bolsena, while the fieno (hay) of Canepina has, accompanied by paglia (straw), been absorbed into the repertory of the pan-Italian grande cucina. All these pastas were served with much the same sauce, plain tomato and basil, though on feast days, pork, lamb, or beef would be added. It is impossible, as well as historically incorrect, to make hard-and-fast distinctions among the dishes of the region’s separate geographical areas—whether Tuscia, Sabina, or the Ciociaria—since by this time the Roman popular cuisine had adopted and absorbed almost all these dishes and made them its own.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, residents of Rome’s Prati quarter—in the shadow of Castel Sant’Angelo—could still see the Tiber flow and hear the crickets and cicadas inside the fortress. Public transport from there to Viale Manzoni was a horse-drawn trolley that started at Piazza Navona. The best salamis came from Ignazio in Via della Scrofa and the finest fresh cheese from Bernardini, the milkman in Via della Stelletta. The best panpepato was from the baker Gioggi at the Circo Agonale (Piazza Navona), and lamb and sweetbreads were booked ahead with Giorgi, the butcher.
In the evening, people dined at home by gaslight, and after dinner they went out to the caffè to chat with friends till late. In summer, there were concerts in Piazza Colonna or at the Caffè Guardabossi in Piazza Montecitorio. But those with a sweet tooth left the music to others and concentrated on the famous cassata siciliana or sorbets at Aragno.6
And that was decades, not centuries, ago.
The Agrarian Landscape of the Campagna Romana
In his Grand Tour in Italy, Goethe, who saw the Roman countryside, the agro romano, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, recounts how he found it as it must have been when, in the fifth century B.C., Cincinnatus7 was persuaded to leave his plow and return to public life. We have no way of knowing where Cincinnatus’s farm at Prata Quinctia was actually located, but it was probably along the Via Salaria, near the present-day Borgo Quinzio, and there he was, bent over his hoe, when the senators arrived from Rome to beg him to return. Nor do we know what he was growing, but surely there were onions, cabbages, and beans and perhaps a few olive trees from which to press oil for soups and to light his lamps. Goethe’s point, and he was right, was that no advances had been made in the intervening millennia. Unless impeded, the waters of the marshes would take it over. During the Roman Republic, the wise administration promoted drainage projects and channeling of the waters. The Etruscans, the best farmers of antiquity, had tackled the same problem by harnessing the waters for irrigation. And in the countryside, the people lived by farming also in nonoptimal environmental situations.8 This was still, in Cicero’s day, the agrarian situation in the agro romano, which he mentions in his orations on agrarian law.9
The villas and large farms of the Roman patricians were placed on salubrious hillsides, while slaves tended the extensive holdings on the plains. With the fall of the empire, conventionally dated to A.D. 476, the countryside became an ager desertus. No one took care of the drainage, and the road system was abandoned to the brush; the ruined aqueducts were not repaired, and malaria took more and more victims. This is partly why, at the turn of the sixth century, most of the immense territory passed into the hands of the Church, mainly through donations of lands by this time unfarmed and unprofitable, or even through donations of barbarian kings, not always and not all marauders, as tradition would have it. For example, it is known that, during the third siege of Rome,10 the Goth king Totila invited the peasants to work in peace and bring him the tribute they would otherwise have delivered to their legitimate masters.
After the invasions by the Visigoths and Vandals in the fifth century, agriculture in the countryside briefly resumed. The Church, led by Pope Gregory the Great (590–604), the careful organizer of the ecclesiastical holdings, had three large patrimoni (assets) at the time, each of which was composed of many estates, or massae. These were in turn made up of numerous fundus (farms) that included casali, or “farmhouses,” that were so important that their names have survived to this day where the buildings stood.
It was during the pontificate of Gregory that the Lombard hordes fell on Lazio and put the countryside to fire and sword. But as soon as peace was made with Agilulf,11 work in the fields gradually resumed. The donations registered by Anastasio Bibliotecario,12 following the invasions of the Goths and Lombards, describe the campagna romana as sown with farms and covered with crops and orchards.
The eighth century was the century of the foundation of the domuscultae by Popes Zachary (741–52) and Hadrian I (772–95), with the intent of giving a new breath to agriculture. Domuscultae were small clusters of houses near a main road, served by a modest church, hospice, warehouses, taverns, fountains, and barns. These villages initially appeared in the lower Tiber valley north of Rome; later they multiplied over the whole agro romano. The first domusculta was Sulpiciana (ancient Bovillae); a second was on the Via Tiburtina, five Roman miles from Rome; Pratolungo rose on the
