Foodies love to delve deep, into the real roots of cuisine – the Alpha point from which all that sauce flows. There’s no better place to plumb those depths than the Eternal City. None.
Seems the splendiferous stuff we savor today began humbly, with traditional cucina povera, or ‘poor cooking.’ Context Travel just trotted out a new three-hour walking tour of central Rome, a perambulating “annotated dinner” that gets to the heart of Italian cuisine, tracing its lineage back to antiquity. The tour takes you to some of the city’s most authentic trattoria. The people who lead this foodie foray know their stuff, recognized scholars and experts in the field.
The Cucina Povera tour covers a lot of territory, touching on the role of the Papal Court, agricultural policies and sustainability in producing what ends up on your plate. And talk about local, this mode of cooking draws ingredients from the surrounding countryside. Such are born dishes like risotto and chicory, chestnuts and pasta with beans. The hills encircling Rome are rife with indigenous ingredients.
Europe is also rife with strife just now, and the guides provide context for that too. Context Travel contends, “The recent economic crisis in Europe is engendering a desire to return to more simple and ecological diets across Italy.” Seen this way, “diet” doesn’t have to mean “dull.”
There’s an elemental ecology about eating right these days, and we know of no tour out there that better connects the dots, that makes sense of sauce.
Given what you get – an insider’s insight – the Cucina Povera tour is reasonable: €65 per person.
Story by Jerry Chandler
(Image: felixtriller)
