A day of Roman Food

8am: you have a hard day of sightseeing ahead of you, so you get up early.   The Roman Forum!  The Capitoline Museum!  So, you start your day, as the Romans do, by going to a bar.  This was "my bar" while we stayed in Rome, and by the third day they recognized me and started charging me local prices (about 30% less).

There I would have un cafe, a coffee, known to everyone else as an espresso. And una pasta, a pastry.  Yes, "pasta" means pastry.  It also means "meal" ("la pasta"), as well as noodles.  Anyway, this light day-starter is the Italian breakfast, and runs 2 or 3 euro.

11am: Of course, a small pastry doesn't hold us long.  Normally, at around 10:30am a Roman would duck into another bar and have a small sandwich (un panino) but we needed to drop stuff off at our apartment, so we made our own panini, with brick-oven baked bread, fresh tomatoes, scamorza (smoked mozzarella), and olive oil.  

2:30 pm: Mind you, that doesn't mean we skipped lunch, just had it a little later.  Pasta! (this time in the noodle sense).  These are those "chef hat" pasta I described, here tossed with Grana Padano, peppers, and a Roman marsh grass which tastes like a cross between asparagus and spinach.  I haven't even been able to find the name of this last; it's apparently available only in Rome, and only in April-May.  If anyone knows it, please comment!

Then off for some more exhausting sightseeing!  We didn't have to count calories; never quite figuring out the local bus system (nobody does), we generally walked at least 6 miles a day.

5:15pm: Which meant that we could totally justify some gelato.

8:30pm: Dinner was supposed to be fish, but we misunderstood the fishmongers hours and when we went back he was closed.  So we had to make do with a dinner of a salad of tomatoes, basil and Grana Padano ...

... some baby artichokes, fried in olive oil with salt ...

... and of course more pasta, this time fresh troife and french beans with sun-dried tomatoes, tossed in gooey stracchino cheese.

9:30pm: but no Italian dinner would be complete without sweets! (dolci)  Since dinner had been pretty filling, we merely had a tartufo (a ball of chocolate dough rolled in chocolate sprinkles), and a tart (crostata) made with some berry we didn't know by its Italian name.

So, Rome: practically a diet regimen. I don't know how the Romans can stand it!