The Via Braccianense, a two-lane, pockmarked road also known as superstrada (ss) 493, veers westward
from the north-south axis of the Via Cassia at the small town of La Storta, careens
through the heaving Roman countryside for several dozen kilometers, and smacks
right back onto the Via Cassia just north of the small town of Capranica. A breathless, utopian byway for youthful
males roaring about in hungry Bugattis, it is an upchucker for everyone else.
Upchucker that it is, it is also, unfortunately, the only link to a
number of exemplary agriturismi. So, on a tempestuous Saturday evening this past October, my parents, my sister and her
family, and I decide to brave its spine-tingling curves in search of one of these fabled
locales.
We start the journey in separate cars, my parents in their
battered Opel station wagon, Fay, Stefano, Ylenia, and I in Stefano's
Golf. It is nearly 9:00 p.m. A few kilometers up the Braccianense, we drive
past a scattering of lights flickering from ville
and warehouses clinging to the edges of the city and then suddenly find
ourselves in darkness. Rain lashes at bushes
and weeds, swells in the ditches beside the road, pummels the car. I look through the back window to see if my parents are still
behind us – they are, just barely.
Sharp curve to the right, pothole, hairpin turn to the left,
tree, stretch of pot holes, bush, sudden hump, brick wall. Turn here.
Five kilometers. Mistake. U-turn.
Watch out for the puddle! Here, turn here. No.
At 10:20 p.m. we resign and return to the bleary lights of
the Via Cassia and a small trattoria we’ve been haunting since the family first
moved to Rome
in 1979. It is a perfectly acceptable,
even delicious dinner – thick slices of bruschetta, a plate of saltimbocca alla romana, a side of bitter greens, a thimbleful of
strong espresso with a shot of sambuca.
But I am disappointed and grieve for the missed dinner at the agriturismo.
The last time I had dined at an agriturismo had been in Sardegna, at a rambling, two-storey cascina located just outside of the picturesque
fishing village of Stintino. The dinner had included an astonishing
selection of fresh pastas, local fish, porceddu,
local cheeses, salumi, fresh
vegetables, summer fruits, and an abundance of wine: it remains one of the most
memorable of my many memorable meals. I
naturally had assumed that the meal at the Roman agriturismo would be comparable to the sumptuous meal in Stintino
and this assumption is cause for huge regret notwithstanding the tasty dinner
at the trattoria.
I leave Italy two days later, after meeting up with Alessandro in Genoa. The meal at the Roman agriturismo is not to be. Che sara, sara, I guess.
We had been back in San Diego just about three weeks when I received a special call
from my mom: they had finally found and dined at the agriturismo we had been searching for on that stormy night and was sure I wanted to hear about it. Of course I wanted to hear about it: tell me about everything! Now, my mother is one of
the very few people I trust unreservedly when it comes to matters of food. She has a discriminating palate that is the
legacy of first-rate, Romagnoli genes (her family hails from Emilia-Romagna) and a lifetime of travel. We
disagree on many things, my mother and I, but not on food. So whatever she had to say mattered -- a lot.
Mom's first language is Italian, of course, but when she married dad, forty-odd years ago, she picked up English with very little
effort, and, on the day she called to tell me about her experiences at the agriturismo, she chose to express herself in
English. With no
preliminaries and little fanfare, she passed on her unequivocal judgment: the food at the agriturismo tasted like shit on
rye.
Thinking back to that stormy, October night, it's hard to conceive of how shit on rye might have tasted after that treacherous drive on the Braccianense. I am profoundly grateful that this is a matter of speculation and not actual experience.
7:29:05 PM 
|
|
