Food in Roma

Fonte

HomeMade

Roman cooking still answers to the slaughterhouse, the Jewish ghetto and the shepherds of the Apennines, and four pasta dishes carry most of the weight.

The cuisine of Rome is more rural than its imperial reputation suggests. Its backbone is cucina povera — peasant cooking — refined inside the city in three distinct kitchens: that of the Mattatoio in Testaccio, that of the Jewish Ghetto in Sant'Angelo, and that of the shepherds who once moved between the Apennines and the Agro Romano on seasonal transhumance.

The Testaccio mattatoio, built from 1888 and inaugurated in 1890 to replace the older slaughterhouse at Piazza del Popolo, was decommissioned only in 1975 and remained for almost a century the largest abattoir in Europe. Workers were paid partly in the so-called quinto quarto — the offal and trimmings, roughly a quarter of the carcass — and developed the dishes that now define the city's robust tradition: coda alla vaccinara, the oxtail stew braised with celery and a hint of cocoa; trippa alla romana, slow-cooked with tomato, mint and pecorino; and pajata, the milk-laden intestine of an unweaned calf.

The Ghetto, walled in by Pope Paul IV's 1555 bull and enclosed until the Italian unification of 1870, gave the city its cucina giudaico-romanesca. Restrictions on the trades and ingredients available to Roman Jews concentrated cooking on the few permitted staples; salt cod, courgette flowers and above all the artichoke became fixtures. Carciofi alla giudia — local Romanesco artichokes, pressed open and twice-fried until the leaves shatter — is the most exported example, traditional during the spring Passover season.

The four pillars of Roman pasta share guanciale and pecorino romano. Gricia, the eldest, is shepherd food: pecorino, black pepper, guanciale, water; some link the name to the hamlet of Grisciano in the Sabina, others to the grici, the bread and pasta vendors of old Roman markets. Cacio e pepe strips the formula further, to cheese and pepper alone. Amatriciana adds tomato and traces explicitly to Amatrice, in the high Rieti province — territory that was Abruzzese until 1927 — its mountain origins now formally recognised by an EU Traditional Speciality Guaranteed registration granted in 2020. Carbonara is the most contested: its first written recipes appear in the late 1940s, after the Allied liberation of Rome, and the Bolognese cook Renato Gualandi claimed in 1991 to have devised an early version for an Allied dinner at Riccione on 22 September 1944, using American bacon, powdered egg and tinned cream.

Markets are still working ones. Campo de' Fiori, in continuous operation since 1869, is the most photographed; the Mercato di Testaccio, relocated in 2012 into a covered structure beside the old slaughterhouse, is where Roman cooks actually shop. Mercato Trionfale, just north of the Vatican, and the polyglot Esquilino, off Termini, are bigger and reflect the city's recent demographic shifts. For wine, the volcanic Castelli Romani south-east of the city produce Frascati and Marino DOCG whites, traditionally drunk young from the cellar; for beer, Rome has been the engine of Italian craft brewing since the early 2000s, with small breweries clustered along the Via Tiburtina and in the Borghetto Flaminio.

To learn the recipes, the Gambero Rosso campus on Via Ottavio Gasparri runs open courses and ALMA in Colorno remains the academic gold standard. To taste them, day trips to Amatrice (Saturday market, slowly rebuilding after the 2016 earthquake), to Frascati's enoteche, and to the lake towns of Castel Gandolfo and Nemi place the city's dishes back in the countryside where they were born.