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We spent the last few days of the two weeks of travel in one of my favorite cities, Rome.  Both Christina and I hadn’t been there in years, so we mixed some touristy things with a dedicated effort to eat really, really well.  We armed ourselves with the food book Food, Wine, Rome, by David Downie (published by Terrior Guides):

Downie’s book covers everything food related:  restaurants, wine bars, caffes, specialty food stores, butchers, pasta makers, bakeries, salumareias, markets, and so on.  The book is organized by neighborhood and has surprisingly accurate descriptions of the places and the people who run and own them–this person is shy at first, but warms up quickly, that person has a passion for food on top of the wines he sells, etc.  It was fun for us to read the descriptions and then see them for real upon our visits.

We started our eating in Rome at Da Armando al Pantheon, an old-school place recommended to me by my Roman friend, Francesca.  The service was friendly and warm, and the food was exactly what we wanted:  classic antipasti made from seasonal, local vegetables and pasta ala gricia, in this case spaghetti with guancale, pecorino and black pepper.

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Ok, so I wrote the first part of this post (above the line) back in August.  It’s now October, and much of that trip was a distant memory, so I’m going to cover a few highlights and finally get this posted up.

After Armando, we went to Trattoria Monti, a family-run place with two handsome brothers working the front of the house, and mama in the kitchen.  This was probably the first place I’ve ever been, anywhere in the world, where the recommended dishes (by one of the brothers) were really the best dishes, and those that weren’t recommended were just not as good (typically, the recommended dishes are the ones the kitchen wants to move).  We arrived at 9pm, just at the point when the tourists were finishing up and the locals were arriving, but it was busy with both, a good sign.  While I’d definitely eat here again, it was not my favorite.  Here’s a photo of a lovely raviolo filled with ricotta and egg yolk and topped with black truffles:

On another day, a very good one, we stopped by the Campo de Fiori and picked up a picnic, then stopped by a couple of food shops for some cheese and cured meats and had a picnic lunch.  Then later in the day we visited the wonderful wine bar L’Angelo Divino owned by the retiring but very knowledgeable Massimo.  He served us some proscuitto from Friulli (not Parma!), which he deemed to have a more delicate flavor, along with our wines.  This place was a highlight of Rome, with its walls lined with wine bottles and “Maxi” working both the front and the back of the house.  If I lived in Rome, this would be my home away from home.  Sadly, our visit there was cut short, as we had a dinner reservation at the neighborhood restaurant Renato e Luisa.  Once again, we had a solid meal of antipasti and pastas, including this great looking dish:

Some other quick highlights:

Hosteria Romana, a super old school place where you can see a picture of the owner at his wedding being blessed by the Pope (John Paul II), and the waiters are all older gentlemen who aren’t quite as cranky as they look.  The bucatini al’amatriciana was some of the best we had (note the messy bowl — they toss the pasta in the sauce, right in the bowl and then serve it to you — so good):

Le Sorelle where we had a very lovely meal, finished off with this truly excellent tiramisu:

We also had some great coffees at La Tazo d’Oro and Sant’Eustacio, and fantastic shopping experiences with the food purveyors at Volpetti, Antica Norcineria and the Forno off the Campo de Fiori.  Disan Crispino Gelato had an excellent lemon sorbet.

I was sad to leave Puglia and the beach for the city, but as soon as we arrived in Rome, I felt right at home.  I’m a city girl at heart, I guess, and, except for that one really mediocre place that we went to for lunch that our hotel recommended, the food lived up to all expectations.

No summer vacation can be complete without a trip to the beach, so I was sure to work some time with sand and surf for this trip.  I wanted to avoid the crowds as much as possible, so we picked Puglia for this portion of the trip.  In case you don’t know where Puglia is, here’s a map (thanks About.com!):

We drove down here from Pacentro (actually, Christina did all of the driving, since I’m an amateur manual transmission driver, and the Italians can be a bit intimidating on the road), which took about 6 hours.  This involved a tour around the Gargano Penninsula, the “spur” of the heel of the boot.  While much of Puglia is flat and can be a bit dusty, Gargano is mountainous and covered with pine forest.  There’s a national park there, and it’s just beautiful.

Our first official stop was Noci, located inland in the middle of Puglia.  On the map above, it’s smack in the middle of Trulli Country (trulli are fortified houses shaped like cylinders.  They look like little gnome houses).  We drove around the neighboring towns, including my favorite, Locorotondo, a candidate for “most beautiful town in Italy,” an award given to only 50 or so towns in the entire country.  Puglia is known for burrata, that wonderful cheese of mozzarella with cream injected into its middle, and wild arugula, which you can see growing on the side of the road and which permeates the air as you drive around.

Our best meal in this part of Puglia was at Ristorante Pasha, in Coversano.  They had lots of different kinds of home made breads and some beautifully composed dishes.  Here are a few:

Octopus:

Our boat filled with fritti:

Fron Noci, we headed even further south, to Otranto.  Here’s where the food started getting really good.  We didn’t quite realize that even though you can often see the ocean from many of the inland towns, unless you’re right on the water, there’s not always seafood on the menu.  So once we hit the beach, we came across some incredibly fresh, often raw, seafood.  We also had the good fortune of meeting up with a friend of a friend who lives in the States but came from this area who showed us around.  Some of my favorite dishes from our meals here were a simple orrichette (which comes from Puglia) in tomato sauce (sorry, no photo) and a seafood meal at the restaurant Atlantis in Otranto.  We had these wonderful raw shrimp there:

Still, the absolute best meal in all of Puglia, was at a seaside place in Torre Canne specializing in sea urchins and other fresh seafood, L’Oasi del Riccio (the Oasis of Urchin).  We had had some urchins, directly from the shell, at Atlantis as well, but these were something really special.  Check out the briny liquid inside these things — you scoop everything out with a piece of bread.  Delicious:

We also had some mussels gently cooked in a tomato garlic sauce.  Some of the bet I’ve ever had.

Then there was the spaghetti with urchin, again so much better than similar dishes I’ve had in the States:

And here was the view from our table:

What made this meal extra special was that it was a family-run establishment, with the father working front of the house and his kid running around and playing with the dogs that families would bring with them.  The food was clean, simple, homey but really delicious, and the service matched the quality of the food.  This to me was a great example of Italian cooking — not fancy, just a few high quality ingredients prepared simply.

From Puglia, we went on to Rome for a few days, where food was the primary activity.  That report comes in Part 3.  Stay tuned.

I returned from Italy a couple of weeks ago and immediately ran into some technical difficulties with my computer.  My hard drive decided to die and take with it to the grave a month’s worth of work and the majority of my photographs from the trip.  Thankfully, Matty Matt was able to recover many of them for me (again).  He’s my IT hero.  As well, I had uploaded all of the food photos from the trip and posted them to my flickr account before the unfortunate event occurred.  So now I’ve largely resolved my computer issues, and I’m using the Time Machine function to back up my machine on an hourly basis.  By the way, if you haven’t backed up your computer in a while, I suggest you stop reading this immediately and do it.  Nothing I have to say here is more important than having a backup of all your files.

So on to the Italy trip…

Culinarily speaking, Italy started off slow and improved as we (my sister, Christina, and I) went along.  We started off in Pacentro, in the Abruzzo region, where Christina had been living and working for the previous 6 weeks or so.  I learned on this trip that where Tuscany and parts north are producers of many of the fancy, imported things we eat here in the US, Abruzzo and the southern regions are where the high-volume, mass market products are made.  For example, Di Cecco pasta is made in Abruzzo, as is most of the wine you get on airplanes.  So we had a couple of decent meals, including a seafood dinner in the beach town of Pescara, where we had some great antipasti, including some nice, grilled sardines:

We also went to Caldora, the place where Christina worked, where we tried the Marro dish I posted about on this blog a few weeks back.  Let’s just say that a dish made of lamb innards (heart, lung, liver, intestine) tastes pretty much like you think it would.  But other dishes were quite tasty, like this salad with fresh porcini:

and this house made pasta with fresh truffles.

One of the Abruzzo highlights was visiting the ricotta “factory,” a little trailer on the side of a mountain, where Emilio and his brother make goats milk cheese and ricotta and sell it to local stores and restaurants.  I’d never had goat ricotta before, and this stuff was mild and soft.  Emilio let us eat it right out of one of these plastic containers, while it was STILL WARM.  This was pretty special.

We also visited a mozzarella factory and a couple of wineries.  Sadly, the Abruzzans haven’t learned that they need to open a bottle or two in order to sell wine, so we didn’t get to taste much.  After three days, we were ready to move on to the next part of the trip, Puglia, which I’ll cover in Part 2 of my Italy report.

Have you backed up your computer yet?