Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (16 page)

Openings to mountain caves are found nearby the pastures, and are ideal places for aging exclusive cheeses. For this reason cheese and dairy production is particularly developed in the mountains of the Valle d'Aosta. In the dry climate, subject to abrupt decreases in temperature within a twenty-four-hour span, the action of molds and parasites is spontaneously neutralized in a kind of natural disinfecting. Cheese is produced and aged here, and dishes made of cheese are invented, such as fondue, the most typical of all. Fondue, like other Valle d'Aosta culinary traditions, was created to bring people together, just like coffee sipped in friendship from the same
grolla
, a local wooden goblet, or the horn from which everyone takes turns drinking wine. In the case of fondue, table companions dip crusts of bread into a common pot, kept warm over an alcohol burner. In the pot, the local melted cheese, or more often a blend of local cheeses, bubbles gently.

Other basic specialties of the Valle d'Aosta include bread soups with cheese.

The cuisine of these places is not very imaginative. Fresh fruit, bread, and, among the specialties, only the small Martin Sec pears, with a color ranging between rust and pale yellow, are worthy of note aside from the melted cheese. Unusually sweet, they are baked in the oven, in red wine with cloves, for not less than an hour, then served topped with whipped cream and accompanied by a glass of grappa.

 

The first Jews settled in Rome in 161 B.C., when Judas Maccabeus sent ambassadors there to form an alliance against the united Greek and Syrian armies. The envoys were numerous and remained in Rome for quite some time. Then, after the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70, the first big wave of refugees arrived in the empire's capital, along with an even greater number of Jewish slaves, taken prisoner by the Romans during battle. Their sad procession in the triumphal cortege, under an enormous menorah (taken from the Jews as a trophy, evidently), is portrayed in a bas-relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome (first century A.D.).

Together, prisoners of war and refugees made up the Jewish community of Rome. For this reason, Italian Jews do not belong to either of the two great branches of the Jewish global diaspora: neither to the Sephardics, who passed through Spain, nor to the Ashkenazim, who passed through Germany. Italian Jews are a separate circumstance, and it was they who were the initial vehicles of Christian doctrine in Italy in the early centuries.

In the fourth century, the Jewish community in Rome numbered forty thousand people who inhabited Trastevere, the area across the Tiber. Roman Jews at that time enjoyed the same rights as other citizens, without any form of segregation. As is the case with other national communities, cohabitation occurred for cultural and practical reasons. And so it continued until 1492. That year, as Christopher Columbus (the scion of a Jewish family, according to some) discovered America while sailing caravels flying the Spanish flag, the Catholic King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella drove the Jews out of Spain. Many of them fled to Rome, where their brethren summoned them, still well-off but concerned about the growing hostility of their Catholic neighbors.

 

With the unexpected arrival of a number of Spanish Jews, the Roman community became populous and visible. Meanwhile, the ideological mood toward the mid-sixteenth century, the period of the Counter-Reformation, became so intolerant that no one was surprised when the best friend of the Inquisition, Pope Paul IV (the same pontiff who wanted to destroy Greek and Roman statues deemed guilty of promoting paganism), ordered all Jews to be isolated from the rest of the city's population, in an outburst of religious fundamentalism. He had them confined in an enclosure in front of Capitoline Hill, at the Portico of Octavian, near the piazza where Rome's enormous fish market teemed with people every morning. From that moment on, Jews were permitted to go out only during the day, while at night the three gates of the ghetto were shut with imposing bolts and guarded by city sentinels.

For Jews, the brief but incisive rule of this pope (1555–59) marked the collapse of an entire way of life that was centuries old. In his papal bull
Cum nimis absurdum
, Paul IV defined as “absurd” the fact that for some reason Jews considered themselves on a par with Christians:

 

Since it is absurd and improper in the highest degree that the Jews, who by their own fault have been condemned by God to eternal slavery, can, with the excuse of being protected by Christian charity and tolerated while living amongst us, show such ingratitude toward Christians as to abuse their mercy and claim superiority instead of submission: and since we have learned that, in Rome and in other territories subject to the holy Roman Church, their effrontery has reached the extent where they not only venture to live among Christians, but even near their churches, without wearing any identifying garments . . .

 

These four years set a precedent that would confine the Jews of Rome to the ghetto for the next three centuries. Their houses and goods were taken from them, and they were deprived of wealth and living space (or
Lebensraum
, to use the famous term). Only in 1870, after the Papal State was defeated by force and finally became part of the unified kingdom of Italy, were Jews permitted to move freely throughout the peninsula, no longer confined to their respective zones of residence.

In the sixteenth century, members of Rome's Jewish community had to change their
customs and their entire lifestyle. Yet this new and highly restricted existence full of deprivations gave Roman Jews the opportunity and the chance to invent an imaginative cuisine, which brilliantly assimilated and enhanced earlier Roman traditions, giving them back to the city in a new, innovative incarnation. Today only experts can tell the difference between Piperno, the principal Roman restaurant specializing in Jewish cooking, and the adjacent restaurant, Gigetto, serving typical Roman fare. The two premises, situated a few meters apart, offer nearly the same choices: on the Roman menu we find more stewed meats; on the Jewish one, more vegetables cooked in an original way. As far as the unique pleasure that comes from dining there is concerned, the two places are perfectly comparable.

Not all of Italy, however, was prepared to take in the Jews driven out of Spain by Christian monarchs. Sicily, for example, was under Spanish dominion in 1492; the viceroys, submitting to the mother country's injunction, drove all Sicilian Jews out of the island, ordering them to abandon their homes within three months. After leaving Sicily, Jewish elders assembled four kilometers from the island, in Reggio Calabria, after which the community decided to follow the counsel of a wise rabbi and move as a body to Rome. As a result, Roman culinary splendors, already indescribable before, were enriched with elements of Sicilian cooking, in particular with a great variety of eggplant-based dishes. Before getting to know them better, the Romans considered eggplants indigestible and, on the basis of a false etymology, thought the name
melanzana
derived from
mela insana
, or unsound apple.