Katie Parla is a Rome-based food and beverage journalist, culinary guide, educator, award-winning cookbook author, and Emmy nominated television host. She has written, edited, or contributed to more than 30 books and co-hosts Gola, a podcast about Italian food culture.
Katie Parla is a Rome-based food and beverage journalist, culinary guide, educator, award-winning cookbook author, and Emmy nominated television host. She has written, edited, or contributed to more than 30 books and co-hosts Gola, a podcast about Italian food culture. Originally from New Jersey, she has an art history degree from Yale, a master’s degree in Italian Gastronomic Culture from the Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, a sommelier certificate from the Federazione Italiana Sommelier Albergatori Ristoratori, and an archeological speleology certification from the city of Rome.
Katie’s mission is to highlight great food and beverages, praise the people dedicated to feeding us well, and to get readers talking about what they are eating and drinking. She focuses special attention on Rome, where she lives, threats to local food culture, and critical reviews of restaurants and trends.
Her food criticism and travel writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Saveur, Food & Wine, Condé Nast Traveler, Condé Nast Traveller UK, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, Lucky Peach, Corriere della Sera, Imbibe, Monocle, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Olive, AFAR, Punch, Wine Enthusiast, National Geographic Traveler, Eater, Delicious, Epicurious, Serious Eats, Food Republic, The Atlantic, Gather Journal, and The Sunday Times Magazine.
Her titles “Eating & Drinking in Rome” (available for Kindle, Nook, and in PDF format), National Geographic’s Walking Rome,Tasting Rome: Fresh Flavors and Forgotten Recipes from an Ancient City, Flour Lab: An At-Home Guide to Baking with Freshly Milled Grains, American Sfoglino: A Master Class in Homemade Pasta, and Food of the Italian South: Recipes for Classic, Disappearing, and Lost Dishes are on sale now!
In her cookbook, Food of the Italian South, Katie shares rich recipes and historical and cultural insights that encapsulate the miles of rugged beaches, sheep-dotted mountains, meditatively quiet towns, and, most importantly, culinary traditions unique to this precious piece of Italy.
When not writing cookbooks or filing articles for publications like Saveur, Food & Wine, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Eater, and The New York Times, you can find Katie leading culinary walking tours of Rome and virtual wine tastings, cocktail seminar, and cooking classes.
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[00:00:00] Katie: I still don't know if I'm good at any of this. Early on, I wouldn't even say that I could cook. Like, of course I can cook I've been cooking for fucking 35 years, but I would never give myself the like credit that like I'm capable of doing this because I didn't feel somehow like I'd earned it because I'd never run a kitchen before.
You know, I'm a home cook. So I think it just kind of came from like, I need to work all the time. [00:00:30] This is something that I'm definitely like deeply examining with my therapist on a regular basis, but I just need to be like always trying different things. Seeing how this type of job fits, like what does this experience feel like?
You know, writing cookbooks is chaos in your life. It's chaos on your body. It's chaos on your interpersonal relationships. After the first couple, I was like, oh, like, I can do this. This sucks. It's hard. It's not like brain surgery or anything, but it's [00:01:00] like, it's legit so much time and like just so much brain power and you just can't make space for anything else. But I was like, this is kind of my natural habitat.
[00:01:16] Jordan: Welcome to the Prix Fixe Podcast, a podcast for the new voices in the food and beverage world share their stories and journeys in their own words. The show is produced and edited by me, Jordan Haro in Los Angeles, California.[00:01:30]
"Oh, Rome city of the soul," Lord Byron said. What was once the center of empire has become gazed upon by poets and romantics as a Memento Mori of Western civilization, a cautionary tale of the hubris of man. An ancient kingdom of inhabitants past who believed their final destination to exist somewhere either beyond Hades or the pearly gates, who now haunt its cobblestone streets filled with fanny pack-clad tourists hailing from [00:02:00] across the globe. Rome is one of those destinations that with the right intel can provide a lifetime's worth of memories in a matter of days. It's a place that can enchant you to a point of questioning your life back home. How many times have you taken a trip like that and thought to yourself, "what if I dropped everything and moved here?" Katie Parla was one of those tourists who did just that; cross the threshold and became a Roman. And like Colonel Kurtz going native was [00:02:30] surprisingly easier for her than most others and involved eating a lot of organ meat. Before knowing each other, her blog saved me from the brink of disaster when I serendipitously found myself in Rome during August, which I did not know is when most of the city's restaurants shutter their doors for their slow season. Her list of where to eat in Rome in August became my marauders map of sorts and helped me enjoy this enormous city. She wears many hats, a journalist, educator, culinary [00:03:00] guide and podcast host. She's the award-winning cookbook writer of Tasting Rome, Food of the Italian South, and her newest, The Joy of Pizza, as well as several others. All are beautiful works of art that belong in the must-buy category for anyone remotely interested in Italian food. She's such an authority Stanley Tucci called her up to be on his Emmy nominated, 'Searching for Italy,' show to help him find the best offal in town. Katie is that friend, everyone needs who you can call up and get a [00:03:30] recommendation from. Every great city needs someone like her. Let's listen to what she has to say.
[00:03:40] Katie: I was a 21 year old, recent college graduate with a degree in art history, but already a plan to move to Rome. So I moved. In 03' when I was 22, 21, you can do the math. And I mean, when I was a [00:04:00] teenager, I was really interested in like Italian American culture. I visited Italy with my Latin class when I was 16 and, you know, walked off the plane onto like a terrible tour bus situation, but was like totally floored by everything that I encountered, mainly because it was so different than my Italian American Jersey heritage. And I kind of wanted to learn everything about it, but you know, 16 year old kid from Jersey, like, how do you move to Italy? What does that even mean? So I just started studying Italian at like the local community college then [00:04:30] I went to like actual college and studied art history and, uh, and moved here with the intention of perfecting my Italian so I could do my graduate studies in art history, but I got instantly distracted by wine and food, as you can imagine, this is not a unique story. Because I was really interested in having like sort of academic chops and proper credentials I started actually studying those subjects, um, just after moving here. Um, but not really knowing what to do with the, like a somm certificate [00:05:00] and a masters in food history, but like no desire to own a restaurant or even work in a restaurant. Although I did grow up in them and my dad still has one in New Jersey today. I mean, there's a, there's like the identity that I think a lot of people in the tri-state area have where people are like, oh, where you from? You're like, "I'm Italian!" But you're definitely a hundred percent not, there's always an interest in like where your roots are. Obviously migration is an important feature of the tri-state area's development and [00:05:30] story. But like I grew up in a family that was pretty assimilated. My great, great grandparents on one side came from Italy. My grandmother had celiac disease. So like the whole pasta equation was a little bit disrupted. And so I don't think I necessarily had that classic . Italian-American American upbringing. Nevertheless, I did identify sort of culturally as Italian until I moved to Italy and I'm like, oh, I'm American. Yeah. This is something else. Um, [00:06:00] although catch me in. Catch me riding my bike down the street in Rome, or like getting ripped off by a taxi driver. And I instantly snap into like hardcore Roman dialect. And you would never know I was born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey.
My dad opened his restaurant, Clydz in New Brunswick when I was in high school. Um, and I, you know, worked there. In, mostly in a support capacity, um, barback, busser, and then a little bit in a service [00:06:30] capacity too, I, I like tend to day bar, um, and, uh, did some hosting. I'm a terrible, terrible server, so that- let's not talk about how that ended, but in any event, um, I grew up always super fascinated with food and always working in restaurants. I figured out a different way to be in hospitality, um, and food education and stuff like that without having you know, the significant responsibility of running a restaurant. I had kind of a list of things that I didn't want to do. Like I went to a [00:07:00] very prestigious university where you're sort of told, like, you may, uh, be a trader, you may be a lawyer, you may be a doctor, you may go into the CIA and not the culinary school one.
Um, so I'm like, okay, fuck that piece out.. I want to live in Italy anyway, and I didn't know how to, I didn't know how to do that, but I, I knew I had to support myself. Like I'd saved money for my entire like late high school, college career. Um, but not enough to like survive [00:07:30] really for a long time. So I'm like, I gotta figure this out. Cause my main priority was to be in Italy. I think that's the only guiding sort of beacon that I had. Um, because I didn't know anything. I didn't know anyone. I just knew that I had to live here and figure it out. Um, I still don't think I have figured it out. Um, it's a complex, uh, country in a lot of ways, but I think, you know, for the first six years that I was here, I was just working [00:08:00] literally like 18 hours a day, seven days a week, I was giving private tours. I was studying. Doing private tastings. I was like writing guide books. Like every guidebook. I know no one, probably none of your listeners know what those are, but they are these books used to carry around when you would travel places. And they were like made from paper and stuff. So I was just doing everything. And like, after just like that six to eight year grind, I'm like, I love all the archeology and history and stuff, but food is really my [00:08:30] passion. Let me see if I can just focus on writing about that. Doing tours about that and talking about that, like, I'll give myself a year if I can, like cobble together some sort of like career doing this. Awesome. If not, like I could tell people about the Roman forum and the Vatican museums, like that's fine too. Um, but it ended up working out and it was a good time because in oh eight, we're just on the cusp of enogastronomic tourism the year before no one visiting Rome like would have booked a food tour. [00:09:00] And now everyone books a food tour now, uh, you know, that was just before, like 'Jerusalem' came out for example, and that's sort of, you know, the model for a lot of important cookbooks, including some that I've worked on that, that sort of encapsulate a city. And, you know, for me, it was really important to be, uh, somewhat of like a culinary ambassador to anglophones.. But to do it in a way that stood up to professional criticism, [00:09:30] whether it was from Italians or from professional English speaking chefs. And so it was like, I didn't really have a plan except to like live here, learn everything that I could, be in as many kitchens observing and interviewing and interacting as I could. And like, honestly, it was a lot of flailing around and like wasting my time writing listicles at first. Um, but it did, you know, after all of that, Uh, sort of like publishing as much as I could and writing as much as I could and talking about food as much as I could. It kind of developed into something a little [00:10:00] bit more concrete.
Pretty early after moving here, I realized that I was like, in a lot of ways, I was very American. Like I'd have two beers. I love beer, Jordan. I love beer a lot. And I would start with two beers, you know, but like normal to go out and have three, four, whatever I'm in. I'm a big girl. I'm an adult. I'm like, you know, 21 at this time. Seemed cool and legal, but I learned very early on that women were not meant to like, get a buzz on publicly, which I was like, okay, this is [00:10:30] not, this is not like an attitude that I'm super comfortable with. I will have to come to terms with this in my own way. But I think I still really haven't like, you know, two decades later, Italy is still just as like, as misogynist, a place as it was back then. Really degrading to, to women's autonomy on a lot of levels. So, you know, TBD, we can revisit in a couple of decades, maybe things are different. We'll see. Um, the, the flex [00:11:00] where I'm like, okay, this is like, I've cracked the code on this, realizing that I could, you know, just maybe pre-game with some open-minded friends at home and then go out for a couple of beers. Romans are conflict driven people, right? They like a robust argument, whether it's necessary or not. So being able to like, hold my own in like a screaming match on the street with someone who will like cut me off on my bicycle or those clashes that come from, like living in a city where people are enjoying themselves most of the time, but [00:11:30] there's always like something kind of dark lingering under the surface. And this has been a feature of Roman life for approximately 27 centuries. And just kind of like adapting to that type of like form of expression. That's uh, that's what I'm like, "oh, no. Uh, actually I'm not American. I'm Roman. This is, this is my, these are my people."
There's 61 million people in Italy. [00:12:00] Right? Most of them live in cities now. 50 years ago, most people were living in villages. There are thousands of dialects. There are thousands of culinary traditions that are sometimes really based around a city, sometimes a sub-region sometimes a tiny village, sometimes like a remote location. So you have this, uh, mainly economic or convenience driven migration from rural zones into the cities, which leads to a disconnect between the land and the people who consume from the land. You [00:12:30] also have a globalized economy, so it's of course more appealing for a city dwelling person to go to a supermarket to purchase their produce. Then to grow their own stuff or go to a farm, even, even the markets in Italy, just sort of traditionally. And this has been the case for over a century. The government has elongated the supply chain. So when you go to the market, you're not going to a farm. You're going to a stall that's purchased at a central wholesale typically. Another thing that's sort [00:13:00] of driving, driving the decline - it takes a really long time to make labor-intensive dishes and in a society where now we have a Euro and it's expensive to live. Uh, women and men both have to work. Um, but it's still a patriarchal society. So women may have, you know, a full-time job, but then also be saddled with all of the, not just sort of uh, stereotypical domestic tasks, but also the financial management of the household, which falls on [00:13:30] women. So, you know, there are all these like gender dynamics and politics that play into it as well. And yeah, like even the European Union, they fucking passed all these laws that make it illegal to make things in traditional ways, unless they're done, not in like grottoes where people made or aged cheeses for a long time, but a lot of the like, especially salami production and things like that has to be done in uh, the sort of least romantic settings, white tiled spaces, a lot of stainless steel, which from a, which from like a food safety standpoint, like, okay. Yeah, [00:14:00] fine. But you know, for a lot of the farmers and producers and, and generational talent that I've encountered, especially in the country side like, where are you going to find a hundred thousand euros to transform your garage into a European Union certified production zone? Like most people are just going to say, "you know what, I'll do this product for home use, like whatever; I'm not going to make it in a commercial, uh, capacity anymore." So, I [00:14:30] mean, this is not to paint a completely grim picture. There's so many people still committed to doing food, uh, legally and extra legally. Um, so I think that's really important and I highly encouraged listeners, especially because I'm sure all of them are just stoked to go travel to Europe eventually. Also hit me up. I have lots of suggestions, uh, for places where you can actually go to small villages, especially in the Italian south.. My most recent, uh, solo title is called 'Food [00:15:00] of the Italian South' where you could actually go and like make it a real impact in the local food economy, by buying and consuming cheese, buying and consuming wine, buying and consuming salami, interacting with people, giving them the sort of energy and exchange and stimulus that they need to keep going and I think that's really important. So like, it was just in Irpinia, visiting a Cantina Giardino and a bunch of other producers, uh, Molise, which is like two hours less drive from Rome has incredible stuff going [00:15:30] on. And then you don't have to deal with all of the major crowds, uh, with whom I'm sure no one wants to be mingling, uh, in the Vatican museums, uh, in the middle of a fucking global plague. Can I curse on your podcast? Okay, cool.
The most challenging and overwhelming thing is picking, like where do I go to tell people's stories? And it's something that I still struggle with everyday because I have, you know, the same amount of time and every day as everyone else does. And I'm not, like I'm a [00:16:00] very anxious writer. I'm not an efficient writer. I have like extreme panic every time I have to put together a paragraph, which, um, you know, like I'm good at finding people and talking to them. Recording them. And it's just like putting it on paper that's a, that's a challenge. So I think being just overwhelmed by all of the amazing culture, I know it's such a cliche, but being overwhelmed by that. And then also like feeling this urgency to document traditions, which [00:16:30] are visibly declining. Um, I feel like every day I feel like I'm failing in like a pretty substantial way because I can't, I can't do it all, you know? Um, and, uh, still haven't figured out how write a, a coherent paragraph in under two hours. So maybe someday
On a sort of base level, I have a deep, like attraction to the [00:17:00] city, not just because of all the tombs and the Roman death that I, uh, referenced earlier. Um, but it has, you know, well over a hundred neighborhoods each with their own character, you can never really know a neighborhood unless you've lived there for a significant amount of time. I've only lived in a few neighborhoods. I love, I love feeling like I'm a local and like, I, I am, you know, adopted by my neighbors and, and my landlord and all this stuff in, in the neighborhood where I live. But then I can go a couple zones over and it's like discovering a whole [00:17:30] new set of rules and regulations and ways of being and ways to like communicate. I just, I love feeling foreign in a city that where I'm actually really at home. For what I do, I think it's really important to, to keep up on trends. Obviously these move at a different pace than in Los Angeles or another, another major Metro area. But, you know, being in a city where I can stay on top of things really have my finger on the pulse. But things don't move so rapidly that I [00:18:00] can't take a week or a month and go somewhere else and kind of immerse myself in that culture. Like, that's really important to me, just like on a, an existence and like sanity level. I just love carbonara and pizza also. So like maybe on like a hedonistic note that's and it's, it's pretty central. Like I can hop in a car and be in rural Molise in the middle of the mountains in an hour and 50 minutes. Or I can hop on a flight and be in Istanbul in the [00:18:30] same amount of time. Um, shout out to Istanbul, one of my favorite places ever. Um, you know, it's, there's just so there's so much potential for like, for travel, which I, I really get a lot of energy from. So for all those reasons, Rome.
I mean, when it comes to specifically Roman recipes, which are so like controversial in a way, 'cause everyone's like everyone's version or their mom's version or whatever, fill in the parent's version - is the best one. So [00:19:00] the idea with 'Tasting Rome' was to actually name the person who inspired the recipe. So like I spent a lot of time back in the day in Flavio De Maio's kitchen at Flavio Velavevodetto di Testaccio, I spend, I spent and continue to spend a lot of time in. The kitchen at Armando al Pantheon; Cesare al Casaletto. And like, there are precisely as many carbonara, gricia, [00:19:30] amatriciana, pajata, like it, et cetera, recipes as there are Roman professional and home cooks. So I've tasted a lot of them. I feel like I have an idea of who who's doing something that can be adapted for an American audience first and foremost, because you know, 'Tasting Rome' and 'Food of the Italian South' and 'Flour Lab', another cookbook I wrote uh were all published by Clarkson Potter. And so their audience is mainly in the US and mainly has to be, you know, you're writing generally for an audience that is [00:20:00] in coastal metropolitan areas, but you kind of also have to be writing for people who are in, um, more rural zones or the Midwest where there isn't the same sort of Italian food culture and ingredient availability. So yeah, just like who's doing something that's awesome that I can adapt for this US-based audience and whose story can I tell? Cause I had my own carbonara recipe who cares, fucking cares about my carbonara recipe? It's much more interesting I think, to connect it to a place that people can actually go to and [00:20:30] experience or dream about, at least you give props to the people who are every single day in a kitchen, usually with no ventilation or windows doing their thing. Yeah. I mean, how do you not offend someone by not picking the recipe or by like excluding them? That's hard. Uh, you know, you do your best and you curate to the best extent that you can. I do like a, an IG Live with a friend of mine every Friday. We explored carbonara as like a theme a couple of weeks ago. And I basically, I looked through [00:21:00] all of my cookbooks from like basically the first time that carbonara is sort of officially appearing in cookbooks, which is like in the sixties and seventies. Right? It's not something that's been around for a long time. Probably the first published newspaper articles in the late fifties and then it kind of becomes a thing slowly until it's in every single book. And everyone says like, "this is how it's done!" Well, the first recipes that are published have garlic in the carbonara, which today, like people would set your trattoria on fire. They would lose their shit because that's not acceptable or there's butter. [00:21:30] Or oil or butter and oil or cream! Today, like people are so obsessed with like declaring that this particular proportion of ingredients or this litany of ingredients is THE carbonara is because we're in a country that from, I mean, from the archeological record is tens of thousands of years old, but from a sort of like cultural and mythological record is from, you know, 753 BC.
So like 27 and a half centuries ago. [00:22:00] Um, and people want to feel like they're relevant and important and what they're doing matters when it really doesn't in the grand scheme of things, because everything is in a constant state of evolution. Even the super traditional stuff that people fetishize, because it's like, "this is the recipe that people have been eating for, you know, 150 years or 1,500 years of this place." Like, no, not really. That's not what the documents tell us. There's always been this slow or sometimes rapid transition of things. The reason that there's [00:22:30] so much desire to protect and defend and give things names and codify, you know, is a little bit because people want to like trap even Italians want to trap a certain moment or a certain experience or set of flavors in amber, which is ironically, uh, the exact opposite of how those things developed in the first place.
I still don't know if I'm good at any of this. And, you know, I think [00:23:00] I didn't even give myself the, like, I, you know, my confidence has increased and been built over time, but I would say like early on, I wouldn't even say that I could cook. Like, of course I can cook. I've been cooking for fucking 35 years, but I would never give myself the like credit that like I'm capable of doing this. Cause I didn't feel somehow, like I'd earned it cause I'd never run a kitchen before. You know, I'm a home cook. So I think it just kind of came from like, I need to work all the time. [00:23:30] This is something that I'm definitely like deeply examining with my therapist on a regular basis, but I just need to be like always trying different things. Always seeing how this type of job fits, like what does this experience feel like? You know, writing cookbooks is chaos in your life. It's chaos on your body. It's chaos on your interpersonal relationships. Um, another thing that I've been examining with my, uh, therapist, thankfully, um, JK, uh, we're not talking about [00:24:00] that at all. It's not- it's irrelevant. After the first couple, I was like, oh, like, I can do this. This sucks. It's hard. It's not like brain surgery or anything, but it's like, it's legit. So much time and like just so much brain power and you just can't make space for anything else. But I was like, this is kind of my natural habitat. So just kind of went on from there. And actually I'm looking over the computer past the zoom screen to like four chapters of my future cookbook, which are sitting on the [00:24:30] floor, um, in first pass pages form. So stay tuned; available where books are sold. Title coming soon. It's pizza!
When I'm writing about Italy, it's really different than when I'm writing about other stuff, because Italian cuisine is not science, right? It's culture in a way. [00:25:00] So it's about shopping; it like honestly, 95% of Italian cooking is about shopping. Right? Getting good stuff and like knowing how to pick out the right, like chicory or mozzarella or whatever. When we sold 'Tasting Rome', like I'd spent 12 years already in kitchens obsessing cooking with people, observing did not feel like I could call myself a cook or a chef or anything like that. You put a list together, you cook some things, you ask people to share their recipes, you cook through those recipes, [00:25:30] you tweak them, and then you send them to your recipe tester. And I've been so fortunate to collaborate with a really brilliant set of testers who are like, okay, well, this doesn't work. This works. Like, I think you missed a zero here, whatever. Um, and so having another competent person who like removed from the culture and can actually think about it from like a US shopping standpoint is really useful. Um, and then it's that, and balancing that with what your publisher will [00:26:00] let you put in a book. Like, I definitely would have put 45 intestine recipes in 'Food of the Italian South' if they let me, but they were not gonna let me do that. Even more than the technical development of the recipes and the assembly. And you know, this is gonna sound like very arrogant, but I think what is the most important thing and what my greatest asset is, like anyone can write a recipe. Like it's not hard. Full-stop. But curating a set of recipes that gives like a full panorama of a vast [00:26:30] food culture like that. I think is a really big challenge. Again, we talked about how I'm little bit challenged with like my confidence or whatever. So I'm not going to even give myself credit, but it's not that I'm extra smart or special. Um, it's that I spent for 'Food of the Italian South', like 16 years when I sold it 15 years, like traveling meticulously, taking notes, like cataloging, all of, I have like photos from like when I had a Blackberry, you know what I mean? Like catalog from my trips to like [00:27:00] Calabria and stuff. Just like thinking about things in a way that like you distill a very large subject matter into a small one. Uh, that is digestible for people with the specific and deliberate intention to inspire them, to cook- ideally- and travel. The book's pretty good. It's okay. Didn't want an award, but that's fine. I'm cool with it.[00:27:30]
I do zoom classes. I teach people about wine and cocktail culture. Um, I do lectures, basically seminars people can sign up for about coffee culture in Italy. Uh, I teach focaccia and pizza making classes. Of course, I've got the Gola podcast with Dr. Danielle Callegari. I am making a couple of TV shows right now and [00:28:00] doing all sorts of like travel, travel itinerary and trip planning for people. Um, I'm also doing my best to visit producers. Usually I give private tours, obviously that's not happening in this moment in time. One of the most, I think, critical conversations that's not being had about Italian food production is the amount of, uh, modern day slavery and exploitation that takes place in agricultural production and not just in agriculture, but in, in kind of a lot of [00:28:30] sectors of the 'made in Italy' Italy business. SoI've been devoting at least three days a week to road trips to go visit producers because you can't actually trust what anyone tells you about their labor practices. You have to actually see how they interact with their staff and the people who are doing the hard work. How their kids interact. Well, Italy has always been a pretty tribal place. People have very, uh, deep affiliations, whether they're political [00:29:00] or athletic. You know, I think the vision that most people have of Italy today is of like a, a relatively stable place. Like footnote; everyone makes the joke there've been like 155 prime ministers since the foundation of modern Italy, which is like pretty close to accurate, but it's not just like a sort of like anecdote that Italy has this political volatility. It, it really played out in a lot of violent ways, especially in the seventies. And maybe not as publicly now, [00:29:30] but certainly in certain neighborhoods, uh, between certain soccer clubs, there is a, uh, you know, a political and tribal clash that, uh, that often comes out in the form of graffiti more often than not, but sometimes violence. And we have a lot of political parties here that range from like super duper neo-fascist to deeply communist and every shade in [00:30:00] between. Um, and as you can imagine, the anti-fascists and the fascists do occasionally clash. It's kind of like the nature of European, I'm not going to call it extreme because I actually don't find the left, the left wing to be that extreme, but, uh, the sort of extreme right wing people and the anti-fascists are obviously at odds with each, with each other on like an existential level. And so it's expressed sometimes with the fire bombs, but that's not, that's not the norm any longer, but yeah, I believe that in a neighborhood, [00:30:30] especially like Centocelle or Pigneto, I mean, even San Lorenzo, where there's this deep, uh, sort of political, social and cultural vein, uh, that people who are either against certain types of commerce or gentrification are going to express themselves in the traditional ways: graffiti, um, or violence. There is a, a section of the Rebibbia prison, which is in Rome. If you've looked at the Rome Metro map, it's [00:31:00] at the, one of the very ends of the B-line. Um, and there's a, yeah, there's a, there's a section for women in the prison. It's mostly the, you know, female companions of like mafiosi who, because of the pretty, uh, draconian laws they basically implicate people who are in romantic relationships with mafiosi and punish them while the like mafioso's out, hiding in a fucking cave somewhere. A lot of these women from [00:31:30] South America, from Italy, are in this pretty awful prison. Um, and Vincenzo, who's a very incredible dedicated person, very deeply affiliated with left-wing politics, which tends to have this sort of food dignity driven activism. He, uh, has been working for a really long time to get the facilities in the prison, transformed into a sort of legal place for cheese production. I got to work with him, raising some funds some years [00:32:00] back, um, to build out the kitchen and the production space. It's pretty incredible.
A perfect day in Rome would start with breakfast, of a pastry and a coffee. I would do that at Regoli, which is in the Esquilino district. Very close to the train station, not the most appealing, in theory, to most people, but I, I love the neighborhood and Regoli has been making pastries [00:32:30] in a traditional way. Their Maritozzi which are basically brioche stuffed with a tremendous amount of whipped cream are the old school Roman breakfast sweets. Um, and they opened a cafe next to the pastry shop. So perfect combo. I'd walk around a bunch, work off that Maritozzo, uh, and then obviously people love loved the idea of like a long lunch and a long dinner, but I always recommend, uh, treating Rome, like kind of a buffet and doing food crawls where you can hit a bunch of places for what is [00:33:00] essentially fast food. We've got a ton of fast food. I wouldn't call it street food. It's not like LA; people aren't cooking on the street. They're in brick and mortar places or in market stalls. So I would head over actually, if you're at Regoli, you hop on the A Metro to Cipro. And then you go grab a slice of pizza at Pizzarium. You can walk 50 meters to La Tradizione, pick up some cheese and cured meats. They'll make a mortadella sandwich for you if you want. It's wonderful. And then [00:33:30] grab some wine or, I mean, we don't really drink cocktails in the middle of the day here, but like you're on, this is a theoretical holiday, right? So you're allowed to have a cocktail or a glass of wine at Fischio nearby in Piazzale degli Eroi. Uh, head over to Panificio Bonci, um, maybe for like a crostata, some dessert, or maybe more, maybe you need another mortadella sandwich who knows. Um, and then kind of hang out, maybe go take a nap in a park, like the Villa Pamphili [00:34:00] chillax. If you're into beer. Pre-dinner go to Ma che siete venuti a fa or "Jungle Juice" as it's called in, uh, Mandrione. And then I'd hit a classic trattoria right now because of the plague, um, places that typically don't have outdoor seating are allowed to have it. So Armando al Pantheon has outdoor tables, uh, six or eight of them next to the Pantheon. Never happened before and not since they opened in [00:34:30] 1963. So it's pretty special. So that would be my perfect day. And I'd have carbonara or gricia or amatriciana or ox tail slash and oxtail and tripe and vegetables of course, got to get your fiber. Um, and that's, that's my perfect day in Rome.
[00:34:56] Jordan: Thank you for listening everyone. For links and resources about [00:35:00] everything discussed today, please visit the show notes in the episode, if you want to support the podcast, the most effective way to do so would be to hit the subscribe button on apple podcasts, Spotify, or any other platform that you're listening in from. Sharing the show with your friends on social media is always appreciated.
Shout out to Sean Myers for creating the original music, and to Jason Cryer for creating the graphics, Korey Pereira, with help on the mix. The [00:35:30] show is produced by me, Jordan Haro with help from Homecourt Pictures, you can always reach out to me at Jordan H-A-R-0 on Instagram and Twitter.
Follow the show @prefixepod on Instagram or email us at prefixpodcast@gmail.com. I appreciate every second of your attention and support and don't take it for granted. See you on the next one.[00:36:00]