Rome Unvisited: 9.12.10

We've been doing so much over the past few days, so I'll try to include everything succinctly! On Thursday night, since we'd been cooking for ourselves all week, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner at a small, family-run restaurant in Trastevere called Da Augusto. It's the kind of place where locals are lining up before the restaurant opens at 8pm (a group of 3 old-timers walked in around 7:45 and their dinner was ready for them). The menu posted outside lists a number of options for primi and secondi piatti, but we soon discovered that our choices were basically whatever they were cooking that night. We watched our waitress fill up carafes of the house wine from a spigot coming out of what looked like a giant wooden armoire with refrigerated sections full of mozzarella and salumi. I ordered a rigatoni with a spicy tomato/pancetta sauce, "all'amatriciana," and then one of the best chicken dishes I've ever had -- simply roasted with a very light tomato sauce. On Friday, we did some homework and went for a run on our favorite bike trail along the Tiber. We had read/heard about this place nearby (on vicolo del Bologna) called Dar Poeta, and decided to try it out for an inexpensive meal. We originally planned on just getting their famous ricotta and nutella dessert calzone, but ended up splitting some pizzas as well. The simple pizzas (like the Napoletana) were only 5 euro, so Kate and I split a pizza and the dessert calzone. Both were delicious, but the ricotta/nutella calzone was definitely the winner, and worth going back for.

Finally, yesterday was our day trip to Orvieto -- a Medieval hill-town about an hour north of Rome by train. The town itself is beautiful, with amazing views of the Umbrian countryside surrounding the city walls. Orvieto is probably most famous for two thing: the wine, and the Duomo (an enormous 14th-century cathedral). We took a morning train from Termini and arrived in Orvieto around 10:30. We got to explore the town on our own, and got lunch (a tomato/mozzarella panino + vino bianco di Orvieto) at a cafe near the Duomo. There was a funny little flea market set up right next to the Cathedral, with old books, records, jewelry, cameras, weird oil paintings etc. We heard some organ music inside the Duomo and I snapped a couple illegal pictures of the baptismal font and a few crumbling frescoes. The Chapel of the Madonna di San Brizio is particularly stunning. There also happened to be a wedding going on in one of the side chapels, and we got to witness the post-ceremony photo shoot on the cathedral steps! I bought a bottle of wine at a small wine shop, because I recognized the label from a section of Hathorne's The Marble Faun that I'd just been reading on the train. It's produced in Viterbo, at a well-known winery called Falesco and is called the "Est! Est!! Est!!! Di Montefiascone." Kate and I found our dream home on a real estate poster in town, so we'll probably be making the move to the Orvieto area at some point soon.