I've come back from Rome with a new appreciation for the food there. Certainly food is one of the great pleasures of Italy, but the focus is usually on smaller cities like Bologna or regions like Sicily. Besides the restaurants – in Rome or wherever one visits – it's fun exploring the street markets and investigating the equivalent of supermarkets. And then there are food tours. (While this mostly seems a recent development, St. Louisan Robert Noah was giving food tours of Rungis, the wholesale food market of Paris as early as 1980.)
And so one morning I found myself getting off the subway at a stop named Pyramide (there really is a pyramid there) to meet the folks from Eating Italy Food Tours. This is an old neighborhood called Testaccio, former site of the city's slaughterhouses, thus deeply blue-collar and now slowly becoming gentrified.
The tours take about four hours. There's a lot of tasting, some easy walking with no hills, plenty of explanation, some lunch, and then dessert. The ebullient Sarah, an American from Ann Arbor who is studying to become a sommelier, was our guide, full of pleasure at what she was sharing with us.
Our group, which was eleven people, were American and British. We tasted things like cornetti, the Italian breakfast pastry, prosciutto, pecorino cheese with truffles in it, tiramisu (below),
15- and 30-year old balsamic vinegar, pizza, fresh buffalo mozzarella from real buffalos, salami made with Barolo wine and bruschetta created by Sarah on the spot in the new building for the Testaccio market with a couple of the vendors' wares. And then there was lunch, three kinds of pasta. We ended up at Giolitti, a gelato shop that is in its fifth generation of ownership. No funky, neon-colored piles of gelato here, just the pale pastels of real fruits and nuts, only those in season, and a circa-1930 mixer for the panna, or whipped cream.
The whole approach was a far cry from organized group tours run by jaded guides for people who are doing what they think tourists ought to do. Eating Italy Food Tours is run by people who like to eat for people who like to eat. Sarah said that it was common for her to run into people she had on tours a day or two before who've come back to the neighborhood to shop and stroll and eat, and after a couple of the (generous) samples, it's easy to understand why. It's 65 euros for adults, 45 for kids under 12, although we had none in our group. Between the food and the entertainment value, it's worth it.
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I have always wanted to go on escorted tours of Italy, especially with food involved. Thanks for this great post and information.