Things to eat and see in Rome

Obviously you will see the Vatican. Obviously you will do the classic walk along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, from the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II down to the Colosseum. Everyone does that, and they are right to. Rome is certainly a place where the headline attractions live up to the marketing.

But beyond the obvious, here are a few things I would tell anyone heading to Rome to make a point of doing.

Stop at the Arch of Titus

The Via Sacra between the Forum and the Colosseum is full of various ancient monuments. Make a point of stopping at the Arch of Titus.

The arch was built around 81 CE to celebrate the Emperor Titus and, in particular, his sacking of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The inner reliefs show Roman legionaries carrying away the loot from the Second Temple, including the great seven-branched menorah, hauled through Rome in a triumphal procession. The whole monument is essentially a stone advertisement for how thoroughly the Romans had crushed the Jews and erased Judaea from history.

For most of the next two thousand years, Roman Jews refused to walk under it. They went around. The arch sat there, a permanent victory lap by the Empire.

And then in 1948 the State of Israel was founded, and Jews walked back under the Arch of Titus in the opposite direction, against the direction of the original triumphal procession. The menorah carved on the inside of the arch, the one being hauled away as plunder, became the official emblem of the modern state.

So when you stand under it, allow yourself a small smile. The Romans built the thing to brag about wiping out the Jews. The Romans, as a people, are gone. Their empire is gone. Their gods are gone. The Jews are still here, and the menorah on the inside of the arch is now the symbol on the flag of a sovereign Jewish country. Who’s still around, Romans?

It is, on reflection, one of the great unintentional jokes in the history of architecture.

Where to Eat

Roman food is one of the great regional cuisines of the world, and what people miss is that almost none of it is fancy. It is working-class food, mostly invented to use up the bits of the animal nobody else wanted, or to stretch a small amount of cheese over a large amount of pasta. The good places are not the ones with white tablecloths.

A few spots I think that are worth your time:

Bonci Pizzarium

Out near the Vatican Museums. This is the platonic ideal of Roman pizza al taglio, which is the square, thick, crunchy, slab-cut style sold by weight. You point at what you want, they cut you a piece, they weigh it, you pay, you eat it standing up. The toppings are inventive without being silly. The base is the best part: properly fermented, crisp on the bottom, airy in the middle. People will tell you it is the best pizza in Rome. They are correct.

La Casa del Caffè Tazza d’Oro

Right next to the Pantheon. Order the granita di caffè con panna. It is coffee, frozen and shaved into a slush, layered with whipped cream above and below. Somewhere between a coffee and a dessert.

Sant’ Eustachio il Caffè

About two minutes from Tazza d’Oro, which makes for an entertaining little coffee crawl. The gimmick at Sant’ Eustachio is that they brew their coffee with water from the Acqua Vergine, an ancient aqueduct that has been running into central Rome since 19 BCE. Whether the water actually makes the coffee taste better is a question for someone with a more sensitive palate than mine.

Osteria Cacio e Pepe

The name tells you what to order, and you should order it. Cacio e pepe is one of the four canonical Roman pastas, and at its best, it is nothing more than pasta water, pecorino, and black pepper, emulsified into a sauce by skill and physics alone. But the rest of the menu is the proper Roman thing, including the quinto quarto cuts: tripe, oxtail, sweetbreads. These are the bits of the animal the aristocracy threw out, which the slaughterhouse workers in Testaccio turned into the best food in the city.

Otello

For another solid Roman meal in the centre, this one is more comfortable, easier to book, and the food is honest. A good place for a longer dinner when you have stopped pretending you are going to walk off the carbohydrate load.