Thursday 29th June was Rome's patron saints’ day, St.Peter & St.Paul’s Day, so I did what every Roman likes doing: ho fatto ponte.
What's that? Have I built a bridge over the weekend? Almost… “Fare ponte” (literally “making a bridge”) means connecting two near-ish festivities and/or bank holidays to obtain a longer holiday. I “connected” San Pietro e Paolo to the following Sunday, so I had a veeeeeeery long weekend at my disposal.
And so, I went to Viterbo.
In case you don't know that already, Viterbo is a town some 80 kilometres (50 miles for those of you who don’t do metric system) north of Rome, and it’s one of the five provinces of Lazio (aka Latium, the region, not Lazio the football team, or soccer team for those of you who don’t do Campioni del Mondo! Campioni del Mondo! Campioni del mondo!!!), the others being Rieti, Frosinone, Latina, and of course Rome.
A local train usually takes between 1h40min to two hours get to Viterbo from Rome — you might wonder why does it take that long: it's because it stops in almost every little station in-between (half of them are actually still inside Rome's city limits):
I hopped on the train at Roma Trastevere, and got off at Viterbo Porta Romana (some trains, represented by the red line in the above image, skip many stations, still they're not direct trains), enjoying the voyage because I love traveling by train.
The last time I had visited it was sometime pre-Covid, and my friend Susanna drove us there — she drives regularly in that direction as her mother lives on Lake Bracciano, which is about halfway between Rome and Viterbo. I remember it was around Christmas time, there was in fact a “Christmas village” in town, and together with our friends Nicoletta and Alfonso, who live there, we wandered around the stalls, I bought some chocolate and raspberry-flavoured sugar, and a mini tank of local EVO oil, and then we had lunch in a lovely trattoria I can't remember the name of to save the life of me, where I ate the most delicious fettuccine di castagne al sugo di funghi (pasta made with chestnut flour, with a mushroom sauce… yum!).
Alfonso, who is an opera singer and director, currently also serves as deputy mayor and culture councilor of the local administration — back then he was a council member for the opposition, and made us visit Palazzo dei Priori, which is where the council meets:
This time in Viterbo I went to a standup comedy show by a local Instagram sensation, Pierluca Mariti (@piuttosto_che on Instagram), then I met up with Nicoletta and Alfonso again, of course, and I also meant to go home hunting in the old, medieval town, which is not museum-like, as people actually still live there, but… it started raining, in buckets, for hours on end.
(by the way, if you ever visit Viterbo, I recommend eating at Il gargolo, everything was so delicious!)
So what did I do in Viterbo?
I napped, mostly.
I stayed at a cosy bed & breakfast called Via Saffi 103 (because it is in via Aurelio Saffi 103…), I had brought along pens and pencils and my notebook and even my iPad, thinking I would've had time to write, I had even brought along my old Nikon camera because sometimes you just want to take photos with an actual camera, not with a mobile phone… and yet, I napped. Heh.
Honestly, I needed that, too. These couple of days were my first proper vacation since summer 2016 — a whole two days! Two consecutive days! — so you can tell when I claim I'm on the verge of a burnout that’s an understatement…
Anyway, when I got back to Rome earlier today, as it's Sunday I went to my mother's, and I found her deep-frying battered eggplant slices, as she was making a parmigiana, and since she's from the south, it's verboten to use grilled eggplant slices, it's against her cooking religion, it's almost blasphemy. And, of course, as parmigiana means fried battered eggplant slices need to be layered with sauce and grated parmigiano cheese, and then baked, the oven was already turned on.
Mind you, it's early July, and it was 32 C (around 89 degrees Fahrenheit) today — people should already be hiding in empty museums or in churches, as
suggests, NOT frying eggplants and then also baking them!But nobody puts Mimàdreh (my motha!) in a corner.
So I’m off to have parmigiana for dinner…
Ciao!
Love this slice of real Roman life. Although I do make grilled eggplant parm, I know that nothing beats the traditional way.
I haven't been to Viterbo in ages, now I need to go.
AND parmigiana is ALWAYS worth the suffering of the oven being on!