Trevi Fountain, Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Handmade Pasta With a Chef

Originally Posted on Christopher's Mister Elsewhere blog.

I cycled to 081 Café at around 9:30am to have a croissant and americano. It's a cozy little place on Via Merulana, between Piazza Dante and Parco del Colle Oppio. I sit down at a small table alone outside. There is a group of elderly people a couple tables away, chatting around morning coffee. Two city workers walk into the café and take their espresso standing at the bar. I take my empty plate and cup into the café and place them on the bar. "Grazie."

I bounce clunkily down cobblestone alleyways, peddle furiously along with traffic down a main road, and am eventually forced to dismount, a sea of people having sprung up seemingly out of nowhere in an alleyway. I've run headlong into the crowd at the Trevi fountain. There are people lining the steps and surrounding the wall on the upper terrace. Influencers clamor for perfect poses, stretched out awkwardly on the fountain wall.

I slip through a hole in the crowd and stand on the second terrace. The scene feels too big for my eyes and brain. The sculptures are precise and astonishingly detailed, especially the small trees. The stone stretches upward into the sky in front of me like a giant wave of off-white travertine. It feels posed to crash down on me and the other onlookers. I climb to the bottom level and stand next to water, dipping my hand in. I walk to the far stage-right side of the sculpture and stand in the empty cavity of stone, viewing one side of the work and the crowd from a different vantage.

I remember my bike, unlocked, posed against a gelataria back on the other side of the crowd. Everyone is looking at the fountain I reassure myself, swimming back up and through the mass of people. As I pass through I hear snippets of Russian, German, Italian, and what might be Hindi. I find my bike still were I left it, the back light still flashing.

In 3 minutes I'm in Piazza di Spagna at the bottom of the Spanish Steps. I was here the first day I was in Rome. I'm back to visit the Keats-Shelley memorial house at stage-right of the steps. This is the house that Keats lived in during the final months of his life while he was slowly dying of tuberculosis. The painter Joseph Severn was his companion and provided him care during these last months as well. Keats's bedroom is preserved almost exactly as it would've been, and they even have his clay death mask, which was used so that Severn could paint a later life portrait.

The building has been turned into a memorial to the second-generation Romantics, a generation that included not only Keats but Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Leigh Hunt. The memorial is home to a museum that displays signed copies, first editions, letters, and other paraphernalia (such as Mary Shelley's writing desk) from this group of writers, as well as artwork by painters who were relevant to Romanticism. The rear balcony of the memorial gives a special view of the Spanish Steps.

I was particularly touched by Keats's room, which has been recreated in great accuracy, even included a period-appropriate silk-sheeted bed. The original decorations, furniture, and even the wallpaper, were burned under Vatican law after the death of Keats. At the time they believed this was a necessary measure against the spread of contagions.

After leaving the memorial, my next destination was 'Gusto in Ponte near the river. This restaurant was recommended to me by my friend Blair. It was easy enough to find. I locked my bicycle to a metal street-sign pole and wedged it between the pole and the wall so as to not clog the alley's walkway. I was seated on the restaurant's rear patio. There were quite a number of people dining here for lunch. My neighbors were two elderly women, one of whom had a small, rather annoying dog. 

I ordered sautéed chicory, bread, sparkling water, and a thick, tubular pasta with a red guanciale sauce. The pasta was extraordinary. The chicory and bread not so much. The bread was hard and the chicory was undercooked. It was the right texture, but the natural bitterness hadn't been properly cooked out. The pasta saved the place.

I went to use the restroom, which was in the basement (a norm in Italy), and couldn't figure out how to make the sink work. This was my first encounter with a a foot lever for water, I realized in retrospect. I couldn't find it at the time, so I rubbed as much hand soap as could off onto paper towels and then, back at my table, discreetly poured a small amount of water in a cupped hand and washed my hands using extra napkins.

I spent the next hour riding aimlessly around the city, cycling through the Piazza Cavour, up an extremely tall cobblestone hill, taking a pitstop in Trastevere, and finally ending up in front of the Curia di Pompeo. I rode through Trastevere, the tall trees embanking the roads were "in their autumn beauty," their leaves the brief yellow-before1-orange, some fluttering through the air into the traffic below. It was very picturesque and like something from the Before trilogy. After passing through a small square with a play are for children, it began to drizzle and I pulled over under an outdoor dining area's tent. I parked my bicycle and looked up at the café in front of me: Caffè Trastevere. I had a quick cappuccino inside and used the restroom downstairs. This is where I noticed the foot level and used it, remembering myself washing my hands at the restaurant table.

The rain stopped for a moment and I took the opportunity to rush off toward my hostel. I needed to get ready for my pasta-making class in the evening. I happened to pass by the Curia di Pompeo, the exact place where Julius Caesar was murdered. This is a free, open-air ruin right in the midst of modern Rome. (So many Roman artifacts are simply strewn about in broad daylight amidst the modern city. It is called the "Eternal City" after all...it's like archeological lasagna. They just kept building.) It is also a stray cat sanctuary.

By chance I noticed a sign across from the Curia di Pompeo, a little hole-in-the-wall pizza joint I'd been hoping to try out called Pizza Florida. I was surprised by the amount of options they had here. It was rather extensive honestly. They had about 15 types of pizza to choose from. There was everything from gorgonzola and guanciale to bufala mozzarella to zucchini and potato. The pizza was very, very good. The storefront is small, so I ordered take away and stood outside to eat it. The owner saw my Los Angeles hat and asked me where I was from. When I told him San Diego he said his brother live in Santa Barbara and take at the community college there.

When I was finished I realized that I only had enough time to make it to my pasta-making class, I wasn't going to be able to make it all the way home. I headed off, following my map. It was a 15-minute ride. As I was riding, it started to lightly rain. A bit more than a drizzle, but nothing crazy. I arrived at my destination, chef Emanuele Faini's Pastaficio, as the last of the sunlight was disappearing. I locked my bike to an inconspicuous street sign pole at the intersection of an alley beside the restaurant and knocked at the front door.

A bubbly brown-haired man with glasses in a white, double-breasted jacket answered the door. "Christopher?" "Yes." He ushered me inside where three Italians and an older Asian lady were sitting around a dining table. The Italians introduced themselves as Sarah, Valentina, and Mario, and the older lady as Nicole. Nicole was from Tustin, California, right next to Santa Ana in Orange County. We waited a few minutes, as Emanuele said there would be nine participants total. A blonde-haired British woman from Bristol named Sharon arrived about three or four minutes after me. Emanuele said we would begin because the remaining three participants had messaged him saying they'd be late.

We were each given our own aprons and working stations within the pasta laboratory, a large room next door to the dining area. Emanuele showed us the types of flour he primarily uses in pasta dough: semolina and 00, poured in basically equal parts into a bowl together. His method was the same as I've seen online – creating a crater in the flour to house your eggs, breaking up the eggs with a fork and then slowly mixing in the flour. The different was in the pace of mixing and, when it came to the use of the hands in pressing and kneading the dough, the amount of pressure you use is actually very little. You need to be gentle with your dough.

Some time in the middle of this presentation the other three participants arrived. They were a family from upstate New York, a mother, father, and son. The boy was really funny. He continually questioned Emanuele about mathematical precision.

After we finished kneading, Emanuele demonstrated the proper rolling technique with his pin. Again, the key seemed to lie in gentle handling of the dough. After the dough was spread out fairly thin, he showed us how you can use a metal crank if you want. The issue with this, he showed us, was that the pasta would come out smooth. We touched the cranked pasta and felt its smoothness. The issue with smooth pasta is that it doesn't properly hold the sauce. Sauce slides off of it and then pools at the bottom of the bowl or plate, creating a sub-par eating experience. It throws the entire pasta-to-sauce ratio off.

Emanuele then showed us the secret to thinning out your pasta without using a metal hand crank. You wrap the dough around the pin and stretch it lightly, then roll it out as far as you can, re-wrap it, stretch it, and roll again. You repeat this process until your dough is thin enough that when you flap it, sending air under it, it keeps air in like a little balloon. This process is actually a bit difficult to describe without actually witnessing it, but it turns out that making great pasta is actually fairly simple.

Next, we created ravioli and tortellini. We mixed ricotta and spinach in a bowl with a pinch of nutmeg, salt, and pepper. We cut our pasta blankets in half, set one piece aside, and then cut the remaining half into two-inch wide sections. We forked dollops of our ricotta-spinach mixture onto our pasta and spaced them about one inch apart. We then folded the sheets of pasta over and used a small wheel with teeth to cut the sides, creating little ravioli squares. We covered the remaining half of the pasta sheet in flour and folded it up, using half-inch creases. Then, we cut the folded pasta every quarter of an inch or so and unraveled them, making fettuccini.

Our sauce was very simple and very effective. Like I said, simplicity was a reoccurring theme. We took high-quality pureed tomatoes, poured them in a steel pot and added half a stick of unsalted butter and half of a peeled white onion. After simmering for fifteen minutes, we removed the onion. All we were using it for, Emanuele said, was the flavor. We did not really need the onion in the sauce itself.

The ravioli and fettuccini needed to be boiled for only three minutes. When you have fresh pasta, it does not require much cooking for it to be ready. You boil store-bought pasta for longer due to the fact that it's been dried and hardened, and that it likely contains some preservatives.

We ate our finished pasta at the candle-lit dining table. It was an enjoyable dinner and the food was amazing. It was as fresh as possible, so I don't know what else I'd expect. I was just happy to know how to create pasta that sauce doesn't slide off of. In all honesty, this was one of the best experiences I've had in Rome thus far. Thanks to chef Emanuele for the incredible experience, the helpful crash course, and the delectable cuisine.