Rome's Dirty Little Secret

If you live in or are visiting Rome you may have seen posters throughout the city announcing the closure of the Malagrotta garbage dump, couched in self-congratulatory back-patting wording on the part of Rome's mayor Alemanno and Polverini, the director of the Lazio region commission.
Most of you are probably asking yourselves what Malagrotta is. Fair enough, as the city of Rome and the Lazio region certainly aren't making a point of airing  this bit of its dirty laundry. Malagrotta is the largest garbage dump in Europe: a dump of all of Rome and the Vatican's municipal waste....unrecycled waste. The European Commission has fined Italy repeatedly for this blatant violation of European regulations, all to no avail. Yes, Malagrotta is closing after 35 years, BUT....
It will be re-opening in a new location in Riano, north Rome. No steps have been taken towards an effective recycling program so Malagrotta will be perpetuated in a different location but twice as close to Rome's city center.

Just last week a meeting was held at the Lazio Region offices to discuss this issue. Renata Polverini (presidente della giunta regionale di Lazio / president of the Lazio Region Commission) and Rome’s mayor Alemanno have appointed a Commissario Straordinario (emergency/extraordinary commissioner), Pecoraro, to preside over this issue and make a decision regarding the Quadro Alto site in Riano. By categorizing this as a Situazione d’Emergenza (an emergency situation) and appointing an emergency/extraordinary commissioner this allows Polverini to supercede the law and avoid due legal process. It also allows Polverini and Alemanno to wash their hands of the issue and avoid making the uncomfortable decision directly themselves to put the landfill site in Riano. Neither Polverini nor Alemanno nor Pecoraro has visited the Quadro Alto site.Polverini and Alemanno say the Quadro Alto site will be a temporary solution. As Rome has made no progress towards recycling how can the Quadro Alto site possibly be temporary?
There are many shocking aspects to this situation. The owner and president of Malagrotta, Co.La.Ri. (the Lazio Consortium for Municipal Waste), is Manlio Cerroni. Two years ago Co.La.Ri. made an application to the town of Riano, the province of Rome and the Lazio region to use Quadro Alto in Riano as a landfill site. The request was denied by all three. Riano, the Rome Province and the Lazio Region all three stated clearly that Riano is not an acceptable site for a landfill. How can the Lazio region now claim that Riano is an acceptable location, just two years later? The town and the surrounding area have remained the same. Riano’s population is constantly growing which, if anything, makes it all the more unacceptable as a landfill site.

Last week on October 14^th Co.La.Ri. purchased 93 hectares in Riano which Cerroni has stated publicly will be used as the next landfill site to replace Malagrotta. This purchase occured just days before the Lazio Region meeting to discuss using Quadro Alto in Riano as a landfill site. In addition, Pecoraro still hasn’t made a formal decision or pronouncement regarding the use of Quadro Alto as a landfill site. Although there should be a competitive tender for the management of a landfill site it is quite clear that there has been collusion in this case.

Why the possibility of starting up a new landfill site in Riano is alarming to its 10,000 residents and the thousands of residents residing in nearby municipalities:

• Co.La.Ri. now operates Malagrotta. There is no recycling of any type being done at this landfill site. Every day thousands of garbage trucks arrive at Malagrotta and dump an alarming number of metric tons at the site daily. Although there are several TMB incinerators at Malagrotta only one is operative….at just 60% of capacity. If Malagrotta is not doing any recycling and the incinerators are not operating then why is there any reason to assume that Co.La.Ri. will operate and manage a new landfill site differently?
• Riano is just 15 kilometers from the historic center of Rome (Piazza del Popolo and the Spanish steps). Malagrotta is double that distance. St Peters Dome is visible from Riano.
• There are hundreds of residences within view and a short walk to Quadro Alto.
• There are schools and pre-schools close to Quadro Alto.
• There are roughly 200 people working each day at the Quadro Alto quarry. All these people stand to lose their livelihood.
• There is a restaurant that has been operating for 50 years just 100 meters from Quadro Alto.
• The proposed landfill site of Quadro Alto lies right above a falda acquifera (underground water source) very close to the surface, and just several kilometers from the Tiber River. The damage a landfill would do to the water is unfathomable. Hundreds and hundreds of residents rely solely on well water for their homes as no city water is available……I am one of those.
• The Parco di Veio (a protected regional park) and the Universita’ Agraria are located next to Quadro Alto. The area is filled with innumerable flora and fauna, including over a hundred edible herbs and greens, free range cattle, horses, wild boar, birds and many other creatures.
• Quadro Alto in Riano is a designated area of archaeological heritage.
• The city of Rome has made no progress towards an effective recycling program that could move this region away from needing a landfill site. The mayor of San Francisco invited Rome’s mayor Alemanno to visit San Francisco to see how an ideal urban recycling program works. Alemanno did not accept the invitation.
• No-one has ever been to Riano to perform a site visit at Quadro Alto.
• No-one has consulted the municipal management, any of Riano’s citizens or those employed at the Quadro Alto quarry site to discuss the plan to turn Quadro Alto into a landfill site.
• The Quadro Alto site still has hundreds of employees, the underground water source is just below the quarry surface and nothing has been done to prepare the site to be used for landfill. How can it possibly be used in two month’s time when Malagrotta closes?
• The ecological damage to the Riano area would be overwhelming, as would the economic damage to the residents. Property will lose its value drastically and businesses will suffer and close. Already property values have decreased by over 50% as Riano and Rome citizens live in fear of what may happen in Riano.

Why has Quadro Alto been selected, particularly when no-one has ever visited this possible landfill site? The Riano area has quite a few tufo quarries (Romans have been mining tufo in this area for thousands of years…..one of the reasons this area is of great archaeological value) and consequently represent already prepared holes in which to dump municipal waste indiscriminately.

Yesterday a great post appeared on this topic on the Under the Tuscan Sun blog. What a wonderful summary of the garbage situation in Rome! I suggest you add it to your favorites and "like" their Facebook page. It's an excellent way to keep up on Italian issues....and enjoy a little tongue in cheek humor!
Rome: WAKE UP!!! It's time to declare war on garbage and on the politicians (Polverini and Alemanno) who are perpetuating one of Rome's dirtiest problems (pardon the pun): the mega-discarica. Join the November 5th Rome city center protest against the proposed new garbage dump in Riano. For details check out the www.sosdiscaricariano.it website (give it a few days to be up and running) and follow SOS Discarica Riano on Facebook.

Wild Spinach (Lambsquarter) Pappardelle

The fields behind our house are a veritable forager's dream. Last weekend we spent all day Saturday enjoying the prolonged Indian summer we've been having in Rome this October. As we walked along we managed to pick a variety of greens for a misticanza salad. We also picked bunches and bunches of wild spinach which I used to make wild spinach pappardelle. We used the very last of our cherry tomatoes for the sauce.
There's something so gratifying about hiking in the beautiful fields and hills surrounding our home and then making lunch from the wild herbs and greens we've picked along the way.

The spinach (Lambsquarter) grows prolifically in the Lazio region, and elsewhere. The leaves are very delicate, thin and tender: quite different from cultivated spinach. Once you know what it is and are on the lookout for it you'll find that it's just about everywhere you turn your head.

As with cultivated spinach, pick the leaves from the stems and rinse them off. Cook in a covered pan without adding any additional water. The water that clings to the leaves is sufficient.

Cook until just wilted and tender, drain and squeeze dry. Chop finely and knead about a quarter of a cup into the pasta dough. Not much remains once the spinach is cooked and squeezed dry so be sure to pick quite a bit.

Sometimes I work the greens into the pasta so they're thoroughly blended and the pasta is a uniform green. Other times, like today, I preferred a less-blended look. I like to see the wild greens that I've taken the time to pick.

Sperlonga Seafood Festival

I've been going to Sperlonga for over twenty years; it's become our seaside home away from home. It's an easy drive to get there and an even easier, more relaxing train ride. The whitewashed centro storico is lovely and beautifully maintained. It spills down to two beach areas: one is the side with remains of Emperor Tiberiuses residence and a small museum featuring the spoils from his villa (sculptures and artifacts). The other beach side below the centro storico is the more recently developed commercial area of Sperlonga, with its shops, alimentari and small hotels which are all family owned and operated. The seafood festival was mostly below this side of the centro storico.
The seafood festival takes place every year and features local artisanal products and hand-crafted items. There are a few extras like music every evening, an art show and various seminars on local seafood and the sustainability issues facing Italy and its surrounding bodies of water. The latter, sadly, was the most poorly attended part of the seafood festival. People want to have fun, eat well and put on blinders for gthese other issues. most people in Sperlonga, country folk by and large engaged in agricultural activities, just don't get how endangered our oceans are and how depleted seafood has become.
In sperlonga's favor are the pride the residents and municipal management take in their town, its cleanliness, the cleanliness of the waters. The seafood served (free of charge) to everyone was a frittura of the most sustainable fish in the ocean: anchovies, sardines and other local, tiny fish.
I love this festival and issues confronting our oceans aside, fully enjoyed the frittura and community spirit this week-end.

Local volunteers worked tirelessly flouring and frying up all the fish for hundreds of people on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening.

Fish were served atop a slice of oil-drizzled bruschetta, made with local casareccio bread. I stayed around long enough to have several servings of fish. Such simple fare, but the freshness of the fish, the simple preparation of  a dusting of flour and then a quick fry in fresh, good quality oil made for a more than satisfactory dinner. Local white wine was served with the fish: house wine, but perfect with the fish.

The beautiful port area, which loops around Sperlonga, was lit up each night and full of stands selling other local foods and artisan goods. I could have left after our little fish fest, but decided to move along to other stands and try out some other foods.

What meal is complete without pasta? In Italy it's almost a must. Never mind that we had our pasta following our main course; it certainly didn't affect our enjoyment of this seafood and tomato pasta dish.
After our pasta, a stroll and gelato we headed back to our house with full bellies ready to sleep and enjoy the following day on the beach.

Saturday Market in late September

It's hard to believe that for twenty euros we purchased all the fruit and vegetables we need for the coming week and gorgeous, almost all organic, at that. We're in that enviable moment of the season when we still have a lot of summer fruits available but are starting to see some fall and winter produce appearing too.
Figs are one of my favorite fruits. Although they aren't available most of the year they are available twice: mid-summer and then again in September. The September figs are appropriately known as settembrini. We eat the figs whole; the purple figs are sugar sweet and the green ones less so but both kinds are delicious.

The woman we purchase from at the Saturday outdoor market in Prima Porta grows a lot of the produce herself. The grapes we purchased are from her vines and are even sweeter than the purple figs. This month is the vendemmia and all grapes are ripe for the picking.
Peaches and plums are still selectively available; the peaches come from cooler areas of Italy where the peach season is slightly later.

Bitter greens are our favorite and a favorite of most Italians: arugula as an addition to salad; cicoria pan sauteed with olive oil, garlic and hot pepper.

Fresh borlotti and cannellini beans are now available. It's time-consuming to remove them from their pods, but well worth the effort. As I remove borlotti beans from their pods I'm continually struck by their beauty; the pods and the beans look like they have been hand-painted.
We prepare a mixture of finely minced red onion and fresh sage, olive oil and balsamic vinegar and once the beans are cooked mix them piping hot into the sauce. The heat of the beans slightly cooks and amalgamates with the other ingredients, producing a surprisingly tasty side dish. Recently we've been making this dish a lot in our cooking classes and it's usually the favorite dish.

One of my favorite things about going to the market is the complimentary odori that are given to you when you make your purchase. Odori are a handful of herbs: parsley, basil, a carrot, celery stock and sometimes a small onion. These are the basic ingredients needed to make a vegetable broth or to season other dishes. It's a nice little added touch to the market experience.

Corzetti Pasta

Elyssa loves to cook and is outfitting her new kitchen with great cookware and utensils. I went along with her to pick out pots and pans at a kitchen store she heard about from a chef friend. I was forewarned: when you first walk into the store you're underwhelmed; it looks like many other run of the mill casalinghe (kitchen supply stores). Even after browsing a bit I still wasn't impressed, but the more we looked around the more I realized that this store was very well supplied with just about everything, including a vast assortment of the best cookware on the market. More on this later as the store merits its own blog post.
Owner Simonetta is a fountain of in-depth knowledge on every product this kitchen store sells. I recognized her immediately and we soon realized we knew each other from the Gambero Rosso three years ago when we were both professionally active with the company. In between selecting everything Elyssa needed I also picked up a few great things. I love making unusual pasta shapes and forms and am always on the lookout for new items. Simonetta sold me a tool to make corzetti, a disk shaped pasta with a giglio fiorentino design. So this morning the first thing I did was to make corzetti for lunch.

After making a smooth and elastic sfoglia by kneading the dough for a good five to ten minutes and then rolling it out thinly, I cut out as many small disks as possible. I then used the stamp to imprint each disk with the giglio fiorentino design.

I used some of the last cherry tomatoes from our garden to make a simple tomato sauce with olive oil and basil. Although this isn't the traditional sauce used for corzetti, a pasta originating from the Liguria region in northern Italy, it was a perfect marriage with the pasta. In Liguria pesto is the traditional sauce used with corzetti.
Corzetti don't always have a giglio fiorentino design; in Liguria one stamp features a coat of arms with a rampant lion. In addition to its decorative function the design also helps the sauce adhere to the pasta.
The Encyclopedia of Pasta, by Oretta Zanini de Vita and masterfully translated in to English by Maureen B. Fant, dedicates a two page description to corzetti, along with drawings of the corzetti and the corzetti-making tool.

Reflections on the Ten Year Anniversary of 9/11

I got up very early this morning to head into Rome for a 9 am memorial mass commemorating the ten year anniversary of 9/11. The sentiment ten years later is quite different from what it was ten years ago: anger, bitterness, disbelief, and the most ignoble of emotions: hatred.

The world is wiser now, at least I hope so, and focused on peace. The mood is reflective, looking to a future of optimism and global camaraderie. No one will forget, as the above pictoral tribute on the cover of a Romanian newspaper shows.

As I drove into Rome it was hard to believe what happened a decade ago, especially on the crisp, crystal clear, blue-skyed day that this September 11th is. I picked up the Sunday paper and was moved to see the entire front page of the Italian Corriere della Sera covered with a moving, water color memorial to 9/11:



After the memorial mass I received a message from Karen, now in the United States, with her reflections on what she was doing at the moment the attack on the Twin Towers took place. Karen is a poignant writer and I've shared her messages before, as I do now:

"a memory if you feel like reading something

I was teaching English to a small group of Saudi students in a pre-paramedic program in the fall of 2001. There was also one Japanese student who had joined the class to brush up his English skills. On September 11, my students were taking a practice English test - the big test that foreign students must take to study at most universities and colleges in the US. We had finished the listening section, and they started the rest of the test, the grammar and reading parts.

I got up to get a drink of water for myself, and walked by the program director's office - he had his radio on, and the paramedic teachers were standing there, looking grave. "A plane hit one of the World Trade Center towers," one said. How awful, what a terrible accident, I thought. I used to work on Wall Street, I used to take the subway home from the WTC station...I got my drink and then headed back to my classroom, and, as my hand went to the door knob, one of the paramedic teachers came running after me..."A second plane hit the other tower." We looked into each others' eyes in silence. No more needed to be said, we knew then that it was a deliberate attack.

I went to call my husband back in our house 30 miles away. He was killing time before taking a job with a Japanese government agency, the "househusband" that year....I knew he would not be listening to the radio, and we had no TV. He was silent with shock and then he half-whispered, "Don't let it be Japanese who did this, please don't let them be Japanese." I told him to stay in the house in case the kids were sent home, and to stay off the phone in case the school called the parents.

I went into the classroom and sat down, watching my students intensely reading, frowning as they searched for answers. I sat and waited for an hour and a half more, as they worked wordlessly on the test, coloring in the little circles indicating answer a or bor c.... I got up every 15 minutes or so to follow the events on the radio in the paramedic director's office, returning to look at those young men. But they were boys, really.

The Pentagon was hit.

I was old enough to be their mom. One of them had told me I was a year older than his grandmother! (I was 45 then.) Just boys. What time was it in Saudi Arabia, I wondered. Did their mothers know about the attacks? Word came of the US airspace and borders being closed. My students were now stranded in a foreign land; I watched them bite their lips, chew their pencils while thinking; their brows crinkled with the effort of concentrating on verbs and tenses and nuances of words and expressions. How many of my countrymen would see my Arab students as the enemy, would identify them with the attackers....in the office, the paramedic instructors' faces were ashen with intimate knowledge of wounds and death and grief, of broken buildings and broken bodies. They knew those kinds of wounds, those kinds of deaths. They knew firsthand the courageous fear of the firefighters who entered the towers when all others were leaving.

I went back into the classroom. It was quite, every now and then a student would sigh...erasers rubbed out answers... The Japanese student was here at the college alone, there were no other Japanese students that I knew of. Were there even any Japanese in this town? Who would he be able to turn to in his native tongue, who could truly understand his reaction, who could read his face properly? How would his parents feel knowing he could not leave the US to get to the safety of their home?

The fourth plane was missing.

The students finished the test. I couldn't face it, couldn't tell them at that moment. I wanted to hold that innocence for as long as I could..."Let's go over the answers right away," I said. "Let's not take a break now - we can take a longer one later..." We sat in a small, intimate circle, going over the answers. They added up the the scores of each section, compared the numbers with each other, talked about the hard and the easy questions, as if it were a normal class day. I was desperately holding on to normality as long as I could, keeping the events and confusion outside as long as possible. Was I wrong? Was I selfish? I don't know.

But I do know that I have held those faces, which stayed unmarked, unworried, unknowing for more than two hours longer than anyone else's I knew, held them in my mind for 10 years. I watched them intently as they discussed the answers, shared little jokes, complained about questions, watched them to remember their innocence as I kept them ignorant of the events which had occurred a few hours' drive away. And for 10 years I have held in my mind those faces when I had to finally tell them, in as simple and direct English as I could, what had transpired outside the door the small sanctuary of our classroom.

There was silence. I waited a few minutes, and I calmly rephrased everything - we ESL teachers are skilled in that, repeating ideas and facts in different words and phrases. They asked a few questions then; I quietly answered. They sat in silience again, and I said, "I think you should go to the internet and find the news in your own language." They bolted for the computer room down the hall, and I sat, alone, in my classroom which could no longer be my personal refuge in what had become a terrifying world."

From Rome to Romania, to the United States and all over the globe we are united in our personal memories of what happened ten years ago, and joined in our shared optimism and quest for a better, stronger world of peace.

Pasticceria Mondi

At Pasticceria Mondi you'll find delicious mini-sandwiches; these are filled with sliced kiwi and brie, a refreshing change from your usual sandwich option....

I've been going to the Pasticceria Mondi regularly for about twenty years now. When Giulia was small it was the nearby morning coffee meeting point of choice among parents following school drop-off. Mondi also happens to be right around the corner from my favorite produce market at Ponte Milvio. My daughter is an adult now but I still head off to the market with cooking school clients several times weekly to pick up ingredients for classes. Mondi is a natural stop off point for a mid-morning coffee and sweet treat before we head off to start cooking. This week I took friends James Martin and Martha Bakerjian to Mondi, both travel & food writers, and I think they were both bowled over by the eye candy Mondi produces every day in its pasticceria.
Mondi is privately owned by the Mondi family who reside near Bevagna in Umbria. The pastry chefs who produce Mondi's edible works of art have mostly started off as young artisans within the pasticceria and made their career there.
Some of the most incredible things Mondi produces are their mini sanwiches (like tiny sliders) and bite-sized pastries, both so intricate and elaborate that when photographed it's hard to tell they are not full-sized, unless you hold one in your hand or place one next to a full-sized sandwich or pastry.

Mini sandwiches filled with tomato & shrimp, zucchini flowers & mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes with a soft cheese & ground pistacchio nuts....



Bite-sized pastries filled with cream and topped with wild strawberries...



At the cash register you'll find a selection of mini gift pastries: miniature birthday cakes and seasonal items like Easter baskets and Christmas packages. Although these cakes are only several inches in diameter they are so elaborate that they look full sized.



It's not all about the mini pastries at Mondi. Some of the regular desserts are spectacular looking and beautifully crafted, and the temptation to purchase is nearly overwhelming.



Millefoglie presented in a refreshingly different way...



These caramelized nut baskets are filled with portion-sized desserts dipped in dark chocolate....



This cake, probably filled with some type of pistacchio cream, is covered in ground pistacchio nuts....



Mondi also prepares a whole line of candies; below is a variety of flavors and shapes of jellies...