My Unexpected Vegan Roots

While I don't plan to turn this blog into another food-and-travel blog, dinner last night simply has to be scribed.

Having eaten enough pizza to feed a small Roman legion over the last two days, I decided to switch it up and hunt down a pasta place. I was wandering, maplessly, somewhere near Piazza Navona, looking for the trattoria with the least signage and fanfare outside, and no menus with English translation posted by the door (general clues of authenticity in a moderately touristy area). I found a place in a side lane, which I will probably never be able to find again, somewhere in the web of streets east of the square. Hidden behind some potted shrubbery and underneath some overzealous vines that had succeeded in swallowing the facade, I found a narrow doorway that opened into a single-roomed restaurant that bordered on being dimly lit. I later find out that the restaurant is called Osteria della Luppa. Seated at a blue and white checkered table laid with heavy glassware and cutlery, I proceeded to study the menu.

First stroke of luck: although no English menu translations were posted outside, the menu handed to me did offer some (very rough) English descriptions of the dishes.

Second stroke of luck: there are so many meat and cheese-free options, I actually develop a mild anxiety over what to choose.

The third stroke of luck is a little more esoteric: I notice that the inside cover of the menu has a small paragraph on the history of the restaurant. In very bad English, the translation claims (with references) that the contentious painter Caravaggio used to lunch in the very room I am sitting. The significance of this little piece of trivia lies in the book I'm reading. When possible, I like to read a book that is set in the place I am visiting. As a moody teenager, I read Hemingway by flashlight after lights-out in youth hostels across Spain, Gerald Durrell during a rainy week in the South of England, and have read and re-read Douglas Coupland at different times over the last eight years of life in Vancouver. My current read, The Other Side of You, by Sally Vickars (while I do not plan to turn this into a book blog either, I do highly recommend reading Sally Vickars) is partially set in Rome and (if you've stuck with me, here's the significant part) it contains a major Caravaggio theme. The book has left me so intrigued by his work, I have added "see every Caravaggio in Rome" to an already impossible to-do list. Needless to say, I was positively hopping in my restaurant chair at this point.

Over the course of the next two hours, I consumed a mixed vegetable antipasto platter, a plate of porcini mushroom fettuccine in a tomato sauce, a basket of ciabatta bread, a fruit platter, half a liter of wine, and three chapters of my book. The only fly in the ointment was a light dusting of Parmesan on my fettuccine when it arrived at the table (despite my repetition of senza fromaggio). Not wanting to disturb a meal that was unfolding with an otherwise dream-like quality, I opted for a little damage-control: I scraped off the offending sprinkles, strand by fettuccine strand. If the server noticed the results of my nimble work at the edge of the plate when she cleared it, she didn't let on.

It was getting dark when I made my way back out through the overgrown entrance, and I took a route that led past the Pantheon where, as if my day could not get any more choreographed, I looked up to see ominous clouds rolling in above the grave-looking dome. It felt like Zeus was getting angry. I ducked into a handy winebar as large drops began to fall, where I progressed through two more chapters of The Other Side of You, as well as two glasses of port, and scribbled the notes that would later form this passage before the details of dinner became dim in the imminent fog. As the rain came down outside, I got to thinking about my family's own secret pasta sauce recipe (which will absolutely not be reprinted here).

What I know of our family's secret recipe is this: it was born somewhere in the hills outside Naples, was made for my father by his grandmother in a third-floor apartment in the Bronx, was later taught to him by his favourite aunt, and has since been taught to both my brother and myself in a series of transatlantic emails to our respective temporary homes in Atlanta, Georgia, and Vancouver, Canada. (After reading what I just wrote, is it any wonder that I have an irrepressible desire to move around?) As I reflected on my latest meal in Rome, it suddenly occurred to me that the pasta sauce which has been handed from generation to generation down my paternal lineage is, in fact, vegan. Only, I'd never thought of it that way before.

If this is how my ancestors ate, I could seriously get used to it. I think I'm going to have to run some more intervals on the Spanish Steps tomorrow, or I'm going to unceremoniously sink in the Tuscan sea come September's swim start.