10th Anniversary Italy Trip

We've been in Italy for an entire week but I've been slacking on writing anything until now. Our first full day in Rome, we started off with a tour of the Basilica de San Clemente. Having been to Europe multiple times, churches all start to look alike after awhile, unless they have some really distinguishable characteristics. San Clemente looks like a standard 12th century church on the surface, but underneath that is a 4th century church, and underneath that is a 1st century house, a temple to Mithras, and a spring. You can't take pictures inside for me to show you what it looks like, but trust me when I say it is worth a visit. Pretty much every time construction is underway in Rome, they'll find even more interesting ruins in several layers under the modern street level. There was one such stretch that is fenced off so people can't walk through it, but there is a sizable cat population that makes those ruins their home. Smart kitties, choosing a fenced-off area to live in!

When we came to Rome on our honeymoon 10 years ago, we only had two or three days, so we saw the Colosseum and the Vatican and lots of coins and dirt and Madonnas con Bambinos but missed a lot of other tourist attractions. Since that was the case, after San Clemente we visited the Catacombs of St. Callixtus and the Spanish Steps, where we took an evening tour of Rome's piazzas and fountains, including Trevi Fountain. However, we calculated all of the kilometers we walked the entire day and I don't recommend doing 9 miles on your first day of vacation, or at least not without stretching your legs afterwards! ....or maybe I'm just getting old.  

Tuesday was my birthday (31 isn't old yet, is it?) and so we took a culinary walking tour of Rome with Wendy, who runs the tour called Flavor of Italy, and also a B&B by the same name.  The tour started at a bakery and went on to a market out in a non-touristy part of the city, and we ate and ate until we said, "Please, make it stop!" Seriously, we were supposed to have a second gelato after an enormous lunch (cacio e pepe, carbonara, and anchovy tomato pastas, chicken and peppers, saltimbocca, and a creme caramel with a birthday candle on it), and it was not possible. Before lunch we had already had pizza with porcini, a tiny pistachio cake, amaretti cookies, freshly squeezed orange-lemon juice, several glasses of wine, a coffee, biscotti and chocolate gelato, and fresh mozzarella and ricotta. Then our guide was suggesting a birthday dinner and I said that was just not happening, and indeed neither of us was hungry later on so we skipped dinner. I'm glad we did the tour so I could taste great food in Rome since finding great restaurants in a giant tourist destination is always hit or miss (at least for me), even in the Age Of The Internets.

We've been in the Cinque Terre (specifically Manarola) for a few days. It's on the coast so Dean has been eating tons of seafood, and I've been eating tons of pesto pasta, since pesto is a specialty of Liguria, though I've been cheating on local cuisine with a roasted chicken or steak or gnocchi with ragu so I don't go into Pesto Overload.  There are two local pastas I had not eaten before. One is called trofie, which is a short, squiggly pasta made without eggs in the dough, and it is rolled by hand (and served with pesto) and the other is called testaroli, which is cooked like a crepe on a griddle before it is cut into pieces and boiled (and drenched in pesto.... Getting the idea yet?). The local shops sell these pastas dried, but I bet I could make them at home too. Focaccia is also a specialty of the region, so we've been happy to do quality control at the local take-away shops selling the focaccia and chickpea flour breads for a quick and lighter lunch (lighter as opposed to eating more mountains of pasta in pesto). The 5 towns (Cinque Terre) are all pretty but 2 of them were heavily damaged last fall by flooding and mudslides so we couldn't do any of the hiking between the towns that the area is known for, except for the super easy 20 min (if that) paved walk from Manarola to Riomaggiore. Otherwise it only takes a few minutes by train to travel between towns. Tomorrow we are leaving for Bologna, where even more tasty food is waiting to be discovered by me.