Food Archives - Inside The Vatican

Mother Martha investigates restaurants, recipes and foodie culture in Rome and beyond

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Food For Thought
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Religious Stays in Italy By Mother Martha The non-profit Association Ospitalità Religiosa Italiana (Italian Religious Hospitality) (www.ospitalitareligiosa.it), headquartered at Via Molina 10 in Varese, a city in Lombardy northwest of Milan, tel. 327-3842841, counts some 4,000 “religious places to stay” in Italy, with a total of some 287,000 beds. These include guesthouses, holiday houses, B&Bs, campsites, [...]

Meals in Monuments
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Meals in Monuments
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Meals in Monuments

Stefano Navarrini Illustration By Mother Martha Since taking over this column in January 2014 from Friar Tuck, whose style was as expansive as his appetite(!), I’ve written about many Roman restaurants. Though all of Rome’s restaurants are now closed due to the virus, we are still hoping they will reopen soon, and we will [...]

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Food for Thought
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Tables Near Raphael By Mother Martha Already an acclaimed artist, at the end of 1508 Raphael (1483-1520) left Florence for Rome, where he lived for the rest of his short life. He was invited to come by Pope Julius II (reigned 1503-13), probably at the suggestion of the architect Donato Bramante, who was working on St. [...]

PROSECCO: Pliny the Elder’s Favorite Drink
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PROSECCO: Pliny the Elder’s Favorite Drink
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PROSECCO: Pliny the Elder’s Favorite Drink

By Mother Martha The year 2019 was memorable for a favorite Italian aperitivo: the sparkling white wine called prosecco. Its terroir, the region it comes from, is the Veneto province between the towns of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, north of the city of Treviso, and into parts of the region Friuli-Venezia Giulia. On July 8, the [...]

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The entrance to the famous restaurant With a double article about the history of books in this issue’s “Of Books, Art, and People,” what more appropriate time to suggest a visit to Rome’s Caffè Greco! Here for more than 200 years the great minds of art, literature, and music have been meeting around [...]

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L'Orto Di Maramao, a "rural" oasis in central Rome During the Middle Ages, Campo de’ Fiori (“Field of Flowers”), today Rome’s oldest open-air fruit-and-vegetable market, was the commercial and touristic center of the city as well as the site of public executions. The most notorious was that of the Dominican poet, philosopher, mathematician and [...]

Food For Thought

We all know that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Indeed, Rome is a layer-cake of history built on seven hills, and it is appropriately nicknamed “The Eternal City” because visitors can see monuments and art from almost every period of her c. 2,700-year history: Ancient Greek, Republican Rome, Imperial Rome, Medieval (if not so much), [...]

Food For Thought

When I first arrived in Rome in 1972 as a young bride, there were no ethnic restaurants except French “Charlie’s Saucerie” between the Colosseum and St. John Lateran, Japanese “Hamasei” near Piazza di Spagna, and the “Cantina Tirolese” near St. Peter’s, a favorite with Cardinal Ratzinger before he was elected Pope. All three are still in [...]

Food For Thought

Salmon Roll At the time of this writing, a month after its opening, “Me Geisha,” founded by Italian-American businessman Giuseppe Tuosto two years after his successful restaurant with the same name at Via Roma 59 in Salerno, is probably still Rome’s newest restaurant. Just off Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, next door to the Chiesa [...]

Food For Thought

Panettone translates as “a large loaf of bread.” Actually, it’s a large sweet bready cake with various creamy fillings, raisins and candied fruits; its dome is covered with toppings of different flavors. Panettone’s origins probably date back to the Roman Empire: ancient Romans sweetened a type of leavened cake with honey. During the Renaissance, it became [...]

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