at the Pantheon, and another in the quarter, or rione, called Ponte. A large exhibition market of fish, the cottío, took place two days before Christmas, after midnight. The opening was marked with a solemn ceremony attended by city authorities, prelates, patricians, and members of the press, even at the beginning of the twentieth century. Three piazzas were rented by the University of Fishmongers and the proceeds were handed over to the Camera Apostolica (in other words, the Vatican), which also collected rent on the stone used as a sales counter. The fish market did not move until 1922, when it was transferred to the General Markets—the main wholesale food market—on Via Ostiense.34
The 1536 charter even dictated rules for correct behavior on the job: “It is prohibited to play with dice on the stones of the fish market. . . . It is prohibited to throw down money for the riffa [raffles] on top of the fish . . .” and so forth. Curiously, the charters authorized fishmongers to sell “wild animals,” defined as “pigs, stags, goats, hares, pheasants, partridges, pigeons, doves, thrushes, starlings, and other tiny birds.” The University of Fishmongers, like all the other guilds of the city, ran a home and a hospital that assisted its own members. Aid was extended not only to the sick and to pilgrims of the trade who were passing through Rome but also included dowries for poor or orphaned girls, support for spinsters, help with burial, and other forms of assistance. The home and hospital were located next to the church of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, in the Ghetto, where the fishmongers had a chapel dedicated to their patron saint, Saint Andrew.35
Fish flowed to the markets in abundance and at a good price, even if the largest specimens invariably ended up on the tables of the rich clergy and the nobility. Freshwater fish were the most common and the most prized, both because they were less complicated to catch and because they traveled a much shorter distance to market. Marine fish were carried along the Tiber from Ostia to the ports of Ripetta and Ripa Grande and were distributed to the city’s markets from there.
Fish were never as important in the regional cuisine of Lazio, nor indeed of any Italian region, as other foods. This is quite odd when one considers that Italy is almost completely surrounded by a sea full of fish, and that for centuries the Lenten fast, by forbidding consumption of meat, in effect imposed a fish diet. The problem lay in the internal transportation, where roads were almost nonexistent and travel times made it impossible to deliver fresh fish to the towns of the interior.
Preserved fish had already appeared in popular cooking in antiquity. During the famous Roman Carnival, the people loved to stop at the wineshops (osterias) to eat tarantello—belly (ventresca) of tuna preserved in salt—and wash it down with a nice glass of wine. Alici, fat, tasty anchovies caught along the shore, were also preserved in salt, in large wooden barrels. Salted anchovies are used in many traditional Roman dishes.
Salt cod and stockfish are found in almost all the cuisines of the Mediterranean area. The very ancient practice36 of preserving cod by drying or salting occurs in Roman cooking in numerous specialties.
Many of the Roman meatless dishes are associated with Lent, Fridays, or any of the other 130 days of the year when, until recently, meat and its derivatives were prohibited for practicing Catholics. On Good Friday, a day of particularly strict fasting, it was usual to visit the thousand tombs of the beautiful Roman basilicas. At twilight, there wasn’t a housewife whose table did not have the famous Good Friday soup, the sumptuous luccio brodettato, or the delicate pasta and broccolo romanesco in ray (skate) broth.
In Rome, the feast of Saint John, on June 24, means snails (lumache), also permitted on meatless days. It falls in the season when the tasty gastropods are fat and full of flavor. After the plentiful rains of early summer, they were collected in abundance in the vineyards and gardens that, until the early 1900s, covered much of the area of today’s city. The best snails are those with striped white shells, called vignarole (of the vineyards). Even today, on the night of San Giovanni, the “true” Romans gather in one of the many osterias in the neighborhood of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran to eat lumache alla romana, cooked with tomatoes and plenty of chile. As late as the 1800s, men arrived at the feast with sorghum in their buttonholes or a few cloves of garlic in their pockets and rang a cowbell, all to keep away the witches. It was also the night when the witches came to Rome on broomsticks to honor their patron, Saint John. With the first light of dawn, they went back south to Benevento and the walnut tree that, according to legend, is national headquarters for all the witches of Italy.37
Only the well-off-could afford the luxury of sitting at a table in an osteria to eat snails; the poor, the so-called fagottari (brown baggers),38 took them home in big earthenware pots, covered with a cloth, and sat and ate them on the meadows around the basilica.
Today snails can be found, both fresh and frozen, in supermarkets. They are sold ready to cook, but true aficionados see personally to the process of purging them, which differs slightly from region to region. In Rome, the snails were traditionally put in a wicker basket along with plenty of bran perfumed with Roman mint, and the operation took several days.
On the other hand, the boom in saltwater fish in cucina romana did not begin until the 1980s: today on the tables of Roman homes and restaurants absolutely everything can be found. But the most traditional preparations are those in which the fish is combined with vegetables, such as artichokes and peas, or is used in sauce for pasta. This is the most typical Roman seafood cooking.
Water and Aqueducts
The decision of Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, to build their city in this place must have had something to do with the fact that its hydrogeological situation gave solid guarantees of fertile agriculture. This wealth was subsequently ably studied by the Roman engineers, not only by the farmers. From the republic through the empire, fountains and jeux d’eau beautified the city and its gardens. And plenty of water must have reached Rome, if we are to believe Frontinus, who, early in the second century, wrote an important work on Roman aqueducts in which he informs readers that the city was supplied with a million cubic meters of water per day.39
An increase in the population, due also to migration and to the great influx of slaves, is probably why the Aqua Appia was built, around 312 B.C. The first of a series of eleven aqueducts, it started from the eighth mile of the Via Praenestina and, running almost entirely in underground conduits, emerged on the arches at the Forum Boarium.40
The Anio Vetus, the next of the great aqueducts, came in 272–69 B.C., paid for with the booty of the war against Pyrrhus, king of Epirus (280–75 B.C.). It took water from the Aniene River, north of Tivoli, and followed the river in underground channels until it reached the city.
The water traveled ever longer distances: in 144–140 B.C., the Aqua Marcia arrived directly on the Capitoline Hill after a trip of sixty miles (one hundred kilometers) from the upper valley of the Aniene, bringing its excellent, cold water to Rome. Much later, in A.D. 212, the emperor Caracalla added a branch, the Aqua Antoniniana.
The need for water became ever more compelling, and so, in 126 B.C., the Aqua Tepula was built, which, as its name suggests, reached the city warm from a group of springs on the Via Latina. Because the water was not the best quality, it was used for fountains and baths. In 33 B.C., Agrippa, at his own expense, built the Aqua Julia, also from the Via Latina on the Alban Hills, to supply his private baths in the Campus Martius. Not satisfied, in 19 B.C., he built the Aqua
John Zahnd, view of the ruins of a Roman aqueduct in the campagna (Biblioteca Clementina, Anzio)
Virgo, which still serves Rome and which, also from the Alban Hills, had the formidable flow of thirteen cubic meters per second. In 2 B.C., Augustus brought the Aqua Alsietina to Rome from its source
