Late One Night in Rome

A mother and son sit down to dinner.

I don’t remember a formal invitation except for my sister inviting me to her oldest daughter’s—my godchild’s—wedding. The groom, with a long family lineage in Florence, met my niece while she was studying abroad. That was years ago, and now they planned a small wedding—our family and his. My sister said, who wouldn’t want to be in Florence in the spring? My brother was already planning hiking trails and city routes. I didn’t respond until a month before. My husband, consumed with work, suggested that our youngest, history-loving twenty-year-old son should go in his place. At some point my son’s friend attached herself to the expedition. Tickets were hastily bought, hotel rooms arranged, and off we flew for a four-day trip to Rome and Florence.

Weddings are like funerals—family gatherings thought to offer hope that grievances could be laid to rest. The reason I waited so long to decide to go to my niece’s wedding was because I would be the grievance coming to Florence. A profound mental crisis afflicted me throughout the previous two years. I lost friends. I lost my job. I lost my agent and momentum in my writing career. In some sense, I felt I lost my family. For the first time in my life, I considered there was a very real possibility that I lost my place in my brother’s and sister’s hearts. It was certain I lost the love of my sister’s middle daughter. Newly stable by the time the plane landed in Rome, I clung to the slim prospect that, in the midst of a most joyous family gathering taking place in a splendid setting, I might find forgiveness. I might find a measure of myself again.

We arrived in Rome around 3 p.m. and checked into a cheap hotel across from the train station. The only thing to do when you discover yourself immersed in Rome’s gilded afternoon light is to immediately follow the most tangled streets and alleys that lead far away from the places guidebooks insist you follow. The sun diminished and night began to pour thick around us while we walked through increasingly narrower streets. We stopped at cafés for wine in unassuming squares, wandered into tiny churches, and drifted through small neighborhoods that consisted of one crooked street after another. My son and his friend detected dicey-looking bars and clubs that reminded them of home. Occasionally, I was sure we were in some other city. By the time I realized we might be remotely near our hotel, it was after 10 and we were famished, our options dwindling. Then on a dark side street I noticed an awning sheltering a small set of tables. Under the awning stood a priest and a man. They shook hands and the priest walked away while the man turned into the restaurant.

A universal truth insists that priests always know the best restaurants. Whether this is a fact is debatable, but I decided to believe it that night. The restaurant’s dining room was already closed, but the proprietor offered us, his last customers, a corner table nearest to the sidewalk. My son and his friend zeroed in on a familiar dish on the menu—veal scallopes in a lemon sauce. I decided on pasta Bolognese. The proprietor himself served us, insisting on bringing with our bottle of wine a plate of bruschetta, stuffed tomatoes, and fried mortadella. He cleared the table and then brought our dinner. My son and his friend cut into their chicken. I picked up a few strands of pasta coated in the thick sauce.

It is one of the most intimate of experiences, encountering an extraordinary meal. Such was the veal and the Bolognese sauce. Their recipes called for a few unremarkable ingredients starting with olive oil and butter: lemon and parsley for the veal; onion, carrots, white wine, milk, nutmeg, tomatoes, ground beef for the Bolognese. Their cooking methods were very straightforward, nothing complicated. And yet, these two dishes—ones we had eaten many times before and thought superbly executed—now tasted not only new but would forever brand our understanding of what fine cooking accomplishes. On this occasion for me, there was also the astonishment of watching my son (and his friend) discover the unexpected intensity of how even the most unassuming food may so overwhelm your senses that it becomes a central turning point in your life.

We ate slowly, deliberately, not talking at all. The proprietor must have thought us simple Americans who he wished would hurry up and leave. We were, and we didn’t care how long we ate. When we finally pushed back and paid the bill, my son and his friend with renewed excitement took off down the street as they were supposed to do at 20, melting into Rome’s warm spring night toward one of those dicey bars. I dragged myself back to the hotel and into bed. The giddy pair required a forced march across the street in time for the afternoon train, and a continuous supply of bread and coffee until we arrived in Florence.

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There is no playbook for family and friends to follow when you emerge from hell. I don’t believe even professionals who have never been in hell themselves really have one. You are stripped to the bone and stumbling about for any remembrance of fractured time. You are frozen with fear that you will remember. You are not certain you will ever forget or be whole or deserve to be loved again. You desperately need to feel loved again.

The hill in the background is probably the one my brother trekked up.

My brother and sister followed their own guidance in which everything was as loving toward me as always. I took their lead and pretended this was true. After the ceremony in the Palazzo Vecchio, my sister hugged me for seeing she needed a handkerchief when her daughter took her vows. She also charitably ignored the white dress I had mindlessly chosen to wear. (Consider this as an indication of how much I still wasn’t all there.) In the afternoon, before the reception and while my sister tended to details, my brother led me on a tour worthy of our dad—through churches and graveyards and to one historical site after another, with stops for espresso in between. Following our dad’s training further, we spent more time than others deliberating on lives lived and events long past. I tried to keep up my side, and he didn’t take note of how little I succeeded.

Yet, as is true at weddings and funerals, not all was forgiven. I have learned since then to remain hopeful that, no matter how far-fetched, there’ll be a time when mercy pecks at my niece’s heart.

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My son and I never talk about the wedding but we very often recall the late-night meal in Rome. The dinner is among the few highlights of parental achievements I managed to offer him. He holds it as the moment he realized the world was bigger than Brooklyn and full of miraculous delights.

And now. . . .

The best recipe I know for Bolognese sauce comes from Marcella Hazan. I love that her most important direction reads,

When the tomatoes have started to bubble, turn the heat down until the sauce cooks at the laziest simmer, just occasionally bubble.

For such an exacting writer her use of “laziest” is so wonderful, so descriptive in its correct impercision. Your idea of laziest won’t be the same as mine, nor yours’ mine. But it captures the essence of learning how to cook right, in which relying on your gut instinct is exactly how you should cook.