Nadine's Letters from Rome: July 2014

I'm sorry I've been away for so long, but I've been having terrible difficulty getting the blog to work properly. Finally I've decided to place all the photos at the end of the piece as if I try to upload them in the text the whole thing goes awry. Sorry about this, I have requested help from Blogger but no-one appears to be interested :(

One of the best things about living in Italy is lunch, a meal nearly everyone here takes seriously. It took a bit of getting used to when I first arrived, and even now, I’ve been known to miss it when running around to keep work appointments, but that alters nothing. As far as I’m concerned, the Italian lunch, especially at festival time, is one of the nicest ways to spend a few hours that I can think of. Easter Sunday saw us, en famille, driving to a local Agriturismo for lunch. What’s an Agriturismo? Well essentially it’s a working farm, which runs a restaurant, and some also welcome guests to stay. I suppose in the UK we’d call it a “Holiday Farm”. Traditionally are renowned for serving good plentiful homely food at more than reasonable prices, and this accounts for their popularity amongst Italians as well as tourists. There are now thousands of them all over Italy, some extremely upmarket. Others Vito sometimes complains are really restaurants with a cow in the garden to give the appearance of being a farm! However many are truly working farms where the restaurant is run as a sideline. It was to one of these that we went last Sunday. Fifteen of us arrived from different places at 1 o’clock along with everyone else that was eating there that day. Vito and I reckoned there were about 60 people in total. We were led to a small, almost square room with pretty basic furnishings, and settled ourselves around a long rectangular table. There were jugs of Crodino and plates of crisps laid out ready on the table and the children immediately dived into the crisps. While waiting for the food to make its entrance, one of our party told Vito and me the history of the place. The restaurant had only opened a couple of years ago and was run by the farmer and his family. “At first they had no idea how to run a restaurant,” she told us, “for instance when ten of us came for dinner one day they couldn’t understand why we insisted on sitting on one table and not two of five. But now they are much better”. After what felt like an age as we were all starving, antipasto arrived. Plates laden with cold meats and cheeses and vegetables preserved under oil (all home produced) followed one after the other, a bit like a Greek meze and were passed down the table. Things I’d never had before too, like fried pizza dough which was delicious. Every time I thought the starter course was over more turned up until in the end I said to Vito “I’m stuffed”. “We haven’t even started the pasta course yet,” he told me. Have you ever had baked spaghetti in the oven? I hadn’t and it was delicious and after that came lasagna, which was good - but not as good as Vito’s (which is the best ever). By now filled up to the lugholes, it was hard not to give a sigh when plates of meat and potatoes arrived, nor to wonder how we would manage to eat it – but we did anyway. The meal was finished off with cake, coffee and liqueurs. We had been sitting for quite a while now and the youngsters in our party were eager to take us to see the animals. Following them out into the bright sunshine, we were introduced to geese and hens, guinea pigs, a splendid cockerel strutting his stuff, surrounded by his harem, (and I am SO glad I don’t live there at 5.00 a.m.) two magnificent Vietnamese pigs and best of all the goats and the baby goats, which were just so sweet. A large wheelbarrow full of olive tree twigs had been left for visitors to give to the goats as treats, and soon all of us were busy breaking off bits to give them, and berating a big black goat for pushing all the others out of the way and guzzling them down before any of his fellows had a chance to get close! So how long did that superb lunch take? We left at 5 p.m. four hours after we had arrived. How much did it cost? Just 25 Euro per head, not nearly enough to give anyone indigestion. Yep! The Italians certainly know how to do lunch J