Field trip: Eataly
19 SepEataly is not on the itinerary of many who visit Roma. If you only have a few days in the city, trekking out to this distant-from-the-center-grocery-store-on-steroids is probably not how you want to spend a precious vacation day. We, however, are always on the prowl for a good field trip. (No permission slips required.) So one day this week, remembering a nice lunch we had there sometime ago, we made our fourth trip there in 3 years. No, we don’t go there often.
Eataly, to me, is not a place to do the regular shopping (for one thing it is a long way from home), although around lunch time, it gets busy with Italians who are snapping up the fresh produce and other delectables. To me, it is entertainment. Meters and meters of pastas, in shapes I have never seen accompanied by colorful produce, prime meats, abundant fish, hanging prosciutto and salumi of every kind, endless cookbooks, kitchen implements for which the use is obscure, row-upon-row of wine, a rainbow of preserved vegetables, a chocolate selection to make the Swiss jealous, and several interesting eateries. It is four floors of decadence. It is expensive. Everything sold there is Made in Italy. Bravo!
Tucked behind Stazione Ostiense, it can be difficult to find when arriving by Metro. The first few times we thought we should leave a breadcrumb trail as we traipsed through tunnel-after-tunnel. This time we noticed prominent signage that guided us. It was excellent, we thought. Perfect help for tourists: giant signs and arrows everywhere…until the last couple of turns where clearly the direction givers assumed “You can’t miss it.” (This happens a lot in Italy: assumptions on way-finding.) The final leg has you traverse the entire under-track corridor at Stazione Ostiense on the hope that at the end one might emerge near the entrance to Eataly. If you decide to go, persevere.
There’s a new Eataly in Piazza della Repubblica. (They took over an old MacDonald’s. Quite the change.) We have not visited yet, but certainly it is more central for most visitors. We’ll make that a future field trip.
This trip, we had a nice look around, and a fine lunch, but we did not buy much: an olive-pitter and some pretty orangey-yellow Moleskin notebooks, which I love for note-taking on trips.
Day One of Five
13 FebFacing another long holiday weekend (the last until Easter) we decided to extend it even more and take five days to explore Rome. We have done so much traveling that the list of things to see and do in Rome continues to grow and we don’t have enough daylight hours to be tourists in our own town. So begins what I like to call i cinque giorni del compleanno di Laurel (the five days of Laurel’s birthday).
There are a lot of mega-sites in Rome: the Coliseum, the Roman Forum, Vatican Museums, Borghese Gallery, the Pantheon. The list goes on and on. And there are so many places the average tourist does not see unless she returns to Rome multiple times. We haven’t even managed to get to all of the neighborhoods yet.
So today we ventured south to the E.U. R., Mussolini’s site for a planned 1942 world’s fair, the Esposizione Universale Roma, which obviously didn’t happen. Today it is described as a residential and business area. We felt like we had left Rome and traveled to another realm.
The architecture is interesting if cold, distant, and rather lacking in charm. The streets are straight, which is unsettling after so long in Rome. If you took in a certain view, it felt in places a little like Washington, D.C., but not nearly as pretty. Washington, D.C., for all its issues, has beauty. Still we were happy to have seen it as the weather was glorious for the first time in weeks.
After the E.U.R., we stopped by the Basilica Papale di San Paolo Fuori le Mura, or St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. This is the fourth of four papal basilicas for us, and it has taken more than 3 years to get to all of them. Way off the track for most tourists, no exceptional art such as Raphael, Caravaggio, Michelangelo, or Bernini, but with lovely mosaics and peaceful. Of course since my hometown is named for this saint, it seemed fitting to visit.
Lunch at Eataly, an afternoon on the couch watching a movie, and shortly dinner at my favorite fancy restaurant in Rome, QuarantaQuattro, where I know Sergio will make a fuss.
On another note, I was shocked to pull up Google this morning and find my birthday was a Google-Doodle. A Big-Brother moment; I assume they pulled the date from Facebook or Google+. Weird.