Ah...Roma

While Paris may be the city of love, Roma should be known as the city of love for food... which, if you speak to numerous people - love of food is way more satisfying than other types!

And I have to confess, I am definitely having an affair with the food in Rome...




Now, before we hit Rome (our first stop in Italy) I was doing good for the food.. enjoying it, but also enjoying the exercise and benefits of that exercise! But then, came Rome... the sweet love of my foodie life!

The first thing we enjoyed (that we also thought was worth posting a blog for) was the fresh, soft bocconcini (baby sized mozzarella) which we paired with some heavily smoked beef brisket (similar to schinkenspeck if you've ever had it) and some fresh, crazy delicious, tomatoes. The cheese was so fresh and yummy and was perfect with the tomatoes - I may be naturally biased since cheese and tomato is my favourite type of sandwich to begin with....

Buttery Soft Cheese with Tomato on Toast

It was wonderful.. *le sigh*

Next up, falling deeper into the Roma web of foodie desire:

Based on TripAdvisor reviews, we next ate at the "Black Falcon" or il Brigantino:

This was the evening in Rome where there was torrential downpours with little to no reprieve - so in an effort to stay warm and try to dry everything that was wet (which was pretty much everything we had) we lingered slowly over this meal and ordered many items to keep us from having to go out into the rainy cold...

First up:
Matthew ordered Bruschetta - however he got not the classical (tomato) but one that had hot genoa salami with fresh mozzarella on it... it was delicious! I would have stolen it all if I didn't think it would have resulted in a divorce!

Second:
Stuffed Mushroom Caps with garlic. Anyone knows that while garlic can warm the body, it can also starve the soul since no one will want to get close to you afterwards - but these mushroom caps were a perfect blend of mushroom and garlic... and I made sure Matt had a couple of them!

We also ordered a Margarita with Fungi Pizza. The pizza was thin and crispy as per Rome's style. The thicker pizza, whose identity has been assumed by the famous Chicago or New York pizza - is actually found down south in Sicily. It was delicious, warm, and had a lovely light tomato sauce that definitely didn't come from a can!

Next came our pasta: Spaghetti Carbonara.. I don't think it needs introduction. It was delicious - but the bacon was terribly fatty (no fault of the restaurant, that's just the way Italians have their bacon).

Next up:
Not sure if it was still raining outside or not, we were **forced** into enjoying dessert... yes... forced. It was so sad... ;-)

We ordered two lattes (4% of delicious milk) and chose a chocolate mousse with some delicate meringue cookies... delicious again!

All in all, the rain let up enough after this to go explore Trevi Fountain and then rained on us all the way back to our apartment (good two hours of walking since it was a Sunday and the trains didn't operate - we knew this going in btw).