Original subtitles

Well it's very exciting to be back in Rome again.

At every turn there's something

of historical significance.

Look at that.

It's literally like you're living inside a museum.

Even if you've never been to Rome,

you've been to Rome.

Its stories have been told and retold on stage and screen,

the city of toga's and gladiators,

power and intrigue, empire and ruin,

and of course La Dolce Vita - the good life.

I'm Stanley Tucci.

I'm Italian on both sides and I'm travelling across Italy

to discover how the food

in each of this country's 20 regions

is as unique as the people and their past...

The famous ancients of Rome once ruled the world...

...but I'm here to discover

how it's the food of ordinary Romans

that has conquered our hearts.

But I'm going to warn you,

if you're on a low carb diet beware...

...you're going to see a lot of pasta in this show.

I mean, like, a lot of it. Like, a lot.

I'm sorry.

I've been visiting Rome for decades.

Its beauty and history still leave me breathless

but sometimes it's difficult to find a good meal

if you don't know where to look.

Rome is situated in Lazio,

a region sometimes overlooked

in favour of its grander gastronomic neighbors

like Tuscany and Umbria.

But Lazio has fed Rome for centuries

and every part of the sheep and pigs raised here

is put to use in kitchens across the city

to make deeply flavorsome food.

To start my journey,

I'm catching up with my old friend Claudia.

She's lived here virtually her whole life...

-There you are. -...and her cardinal rule

for good food is, 'when in Rome, eat as the Romans do.'

-Are you OK? Good. -I'm good. You OK?

-I'm so happy to see you. -It was a long time.

It was a long time.

Somehow almost 30 years has slipped by

since we first became friends

when we worked on a movie here together.

I think that you came first time for a...

Well, the very first time was like '95.

No, I think '93, because it was the Undercover Blues.

-I didn't know I was that old. -I know, me neither.

Let's not mention it. [LAUGHTER]

Claudia wants to take me for a classic Roman pasta lunch

but with an hour to kill,

we decide to get a coffee and reminisce.

Well the San Calisto is a real institution.

That's where we went a long time ago.

Yeah, yeah, we were there every evening, you know.

Back in the '90s we used to hang out

in a great café in Trastavere,

a grimy part of town, very much on the wrong side of the river.

-Here we are. -Yeah, and here we are.

And I was pleased to hear it was still going strong.

-So you remember Marcello? -Yes I do, I do.

Look what's there. The picture you gave them in '93.

It's exactly in the same place.

I think nothing changed in this place.

No it hasn't changed.

A little espresso would be just enough

to whet our appetites before we go to lunch...

...or so I thought.

-I know, I know. -What's that?

-That's... -Who's joining us?

These are maritozzi,

Roman breakfast with a 2,000-year-old history.

You cannot resist one of these.

In the Middle Ages they were one of the few sweet things

the church allowed you to eat during Lent...

...it doesn't seem very saintly to me.

-[TUCCI] Is it like a brioche? -Yeah, it's like a brioche.

-'Cause it looks like a brioche. -And it's even healthier

compared to this. This is bomba con la crema.

It's fried. It's a sort of donut with egg cream.

But Italians don't eat breakfast like Americans eat breakfast

or the British eat breakfast or the Dutch eat breakfast.

[TUCCI] Yeah, 'cause they don't do eggs and bacon and...

-It's always something sweet. -Yeah.

Nice to see you again.

As we staggered off our breakfast

and headed through Trastevere,

I noticed that the area was much busier and hipper

than years ago.

This was the poor quarters,

you see the buildings, as nice as they are,

-are very small. -Right.

And then of course, as it happens

you know, the old quarters got very trendy and everybody

-wanted to live here. -Yeah and they become

-more gentrified and... Yeah. -Yeah.

The city may be changing,

but one thing that's as constant

as the ancient landmarks

is how much people in Rome love their pasta.

Four star dishes in particular

have become an emblem of the city

and Claudia is taking me to find out more

at a place she says is the Pantheon of pasta...

[TUCCI] The restaurant is fully booked...

-But we don't care. [LAUGHS] -Yeah, we don't care.

Well tell me some more about pasta in Rome.

Pasta in Rome is like, you eat it every day.

I mean you don't live without pasta.

Every day?

And everybody has its own recipe

and of course it's the best ever, you know,

and yours is nothing compared to mine.

Right, it's true. It does become very territorial

-doesn't it? -Yeah.

Romans revere what they call The Four Pastas.

[TUCCI] Nice to see you, thank you for having me.

Simple but iconic dishes of staggering deliciousness.

They are creamy Cacio e Pepe,

made with mainly sheep's cheese and pepper.

The ancient Gricia, which has added pork.

Its luxurious cousin Carbonara,

which is elevated with egg yolks.

And finally, our lunch today, Amatriciana,

made with tomatoes...

...and this Roman favourite, Guanciale, fatty pork cheek.

[TUCCI] The Guanciale are a base

for a lot of different dishes in Rome.

We would normally use pancetta

but the taste is totally different.

-Terrible. Terrible. -No.

-No, no, terrible. -Yes.

[TUCCI] Thank you.

[TUCCI] Thank you so much.

-It's very good. -[TUCCI] [SPEAKS ITALIAN]

Pasta's delicious. Delicious.

The sauce is actually quite light, which is nice,

and the guanciale are really delicate.

Yeah, yeah it is.

No, no. I kept some space in my stomach for this.

Ah. Because we didn't eat the...

-My god. -No.

Across this city, every single day,

Romans eat pasta that has ancient bonds

to their surrounding countryside.

Now it's hard to imagine, but this iconic food

was once at risk of being banned in Italy...

Sitting at the big, warm, carbohydrate-loaded heart

of Italian cuisine is pasta.

And fittingly for the nation's capital,

Rome is obsessed with the stuff.

I've been promised the best carbonara in the city

and I've been told to come

to the working-class backstreets

behind Termini Station

and to ask for the Don.

[TUCCI] Tell me what you do.

I'm passionate about popular food

and for a long time I made a show

where I play vinyl music disc and that's...

-Like a DJ? As a DJ. -As a DJ, yeah.

But at the same time...

Daniele di Michele is a chef, historian and DJ

who cooks Italian food while he spins records.

His stage name is Don Pasta.

Oh I have seen some of the stuff...

-Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. -Oh it's really fantastic.

I was pretending for the audience that I didn't know,

-but why lie? -It's a joke.

It's really great.

Don Pasta has promised me

the greatest dish of Spaghetti Carbonara I've ever tasted,

and on the way he tells me

why pasta matters so much to him.

I realised that Italian food is popular food,

roots food.

Italian food is the resistance of the normal people

or the working-class people that eat well

because the working-class people

create the roots of Italian food.

Yes.

Today we may think of a bowl of pasta

as the ultimate comfort food

but there's a distinctly uncomfortable history

of Italians fighting oppression through pasta.

In the early 1930s, Mussolini and his fascists

imposed import bans on various foreign goods.

This lead to food shortages,

malnutrition and a lack of wheat

which raised the prospect of Italian tables with no pasta.

[SPEAKS ITALIAN]

In typical style, rather than lifting the import bans,

Mussolini tried to convince Italians that eating pasta

would make them weak, lazy and even sexually impotent

and that a high protein diet

would make them more productive

and war-like.

The campaign was clearly not a success.

When the fascism arrived

a big part of Italy is with Mussolini...

-Yeah. -...but 30-40%

is against Mussolini.

In fact pasta actually became a powerful symbol

of the resistance against his fascist regime.

Armed with their guns and sheets of pasta

many of the Partisans who stood up to Mussolini

lived in these very streets.

[ARCHIVE] And the great access railyards

from which troops and supplies are poured into Southern Italy

are blasted...

[TUCCI] During World War Two,

this area bore the brunt of Allied bombings

that aimed to disrupt the nearby rail hub.

Tragically, over a thousand people were killed.

This is in essence like a monument.

Yeah, you can see the effect of the war.

Yeah.

People died, the families died,

and all this area is bombed.

This particular square

was home to a hugely popular local trattoria

before the war.

The owner's wife and all but one of their children died

when their building was hit during the bombing.

After the war, the local community raised funds

for the surviving father and son

to reopen the restaurant again.

The boy started work here aged just eight

and amazingly he's still here today.

The story of Roman food, Aldo Pomudollo.

[TUCCI] Aldo...

Beautiful.

Aldo now runs the restaurant alongside his daughter Rossana.

People come from across the city,

and apparently further afield,

to enjoy the comfort of Aldo's family food.

So tell me about carbonara. Carbonara is a Roman dish

but we don't know when it was invented, right?

One story I'd always heard

is that carbonara came about

when the American soldiers in Rome during the war

started missing their bacon and eggs from back home

and wanted them added to spaghetti.

Aldo, however, has his own theory.

It seems some things are destined to remain Roman myths.

What everyone can agree on

is that the carbonara here is incredible.

You have basically four ingredients -

pasta, eggs, the guanciale, and cheese. That's it.

But when I try it at home it's never this good.

My mother does that too.

You could just die now.

When I taste pasta like this,

I understand why it remains so important to this city.

Rome may be the seat of power and religion

but it's overwhelmingly a working class town.

This is simple food that has been elevated over centuries

by people making the best

of what little they had available.

They are rightly proud that their humble food

has come to define Italy to the entire world.

I've headed five miles out of the city centre

using the newly extended Metro line.

Romans have a reputation for resisting change

and the arrival of the subway in 2014

has shaken up old poor neighborhoods of the city,

nowhere more so than Centocelle.

I'm meeting Massimiliano

who's the editor of Italy's most prestigious food journal

to find out what's going on.

Gentrification is moving in on this neighborhood

and food is on the front line.

[MASSIMILIANO] The neighbourhood was born

during the Roman Empire.

Centocelle is a Roman name,

cento carceri is '100 jails' in English.

-100 jails? -Jails, yeah, exactly.

There may never have actually been one hundred jails here,

but what this area does have is three new subway stations

all within close proximity.

[MASSIMILIANO] These things change up the game, OK?

A lot of people came here to try to invest a bit.

-Is this where we're going? -Yeah, it's here.

Let's go in and see what he's got.

Centocelle has long had a rough reputation.

That's changing fast though

and one place that's seen by some as ground zero

for the transformation of the neighbourhood is a deli.

Vincenzo opened this place well before the Metro arrived.

He wanted to rehabilitate the surrounding Lazio region's

mediocre reputation for food

and bring the best of the countryside

back for his neighbors to enjoy at fair prices.

-Can I taste some? -Ah, si! [LAUGHS]

Pecorino cheese is made from sheep's milk

and Rome is famous for it.

Historically the animals were raised all around Lazio

as a cheaper alternative to cattle and crops.

Vincenzo goes a step further than most sellers

and searches in some unlikely places

for cheese that also helps his community.

-What does that mean? -[MASSIMILIANO] In a jail.

-In a jail. Jail. Jail. -In a jail.

Oh OK.

Only in Italy would an ancient cheese recipe

be saved by prisoners.

Right, yeah.

Yeah, that's delicious. Mmm.

As well as sheep's milk cheese,

pork finds its way into almost every dish I've had in Rome.

Historically, pigs were raised all around the city

because they need less space than other animals.

To me, Vincenzo is doing something amazing.

Now people come here from around the city

to this once overlooked suburb.

But over the past few years,

another 50 to 60 food places have opened up nearby.

Romans are renowned for their stubborn resistance to change.

I guess it's what's kept this city standing for centuries.

But Massimiliano wants to show me another café in the area,

one of many that have opened in recent years.

I wasn't fully prepared for what we found.

Oh my lord

It's hard to imagine, but a few months ago

this place was a thriving café and bookshop

called La Peccora Elettrica - The Electric Sheep.

On the night of April 25th, 2019,

Alessandra's café was firebombed.

She set about rebuilding her business

but shockingly, the night before she was due to reopen,

the attackers struck again.

Three local businesses

have now been attacked like this here in Centocelle,

including a pizza place and this jazz bar.

The police still haven't found who's responsible.

Because Alessandra hosted community events at the café,

including anti-fascist talks,

suspicion has fallen on the far right.

But others here blame local criminals

protecting their old turf

or even anti-gentrification campaigners.

But is this happening in other parts of Rome too?

When change happens, Romans resist,

but whoever did this has made it dangerous to sell food.

It seems brutal to attack

restaurants and cafes in this city

that is united in its love of eating together.

Tucked in a curve of the River Tiber

is Testaccio, once known as the belly of Rome,

home to the old slaughterhouses

that supplied 19th and 20th Century Romans with meat.

So tell me about this place.

This is the Ex Mattatoio, the retired slaughterhouse...

...and for about a hundred years, until the 1970s,

it's where most large Roman animals were slaughtered

basically from lambs all the way up through steer.

This four square mile site

will be redeveloped into a cultural area.

But for now, signs of its former life are everywhere.

You can still see the tracks that the carcasses move on.

Oh yeah, for the carcasses, yeah.

Katie Parla is a renowned food writer

who swapped New Jersey for Rome almost 20 years ago.

[KATIE] You got the veal pavilion here...

Oh. Vitellara.

Skinning happened there.

-Right. -The Pellanda.

[KATIE] It's an organised place with so many pavilions.

-Covering a vast area. -Right.

And really influencing the types of foods

that would be eaten just across the street at the trattorias

of the late 19th and early 20th Century.

In butchery, the animal is quartered and those cuts

went straight to the upper and middle-class kitchens

everything that's left over,

the blood, brains and intestines,

was called the quinto quarto - the fifth quarter -

and those were left to the poor.

Some workers were even paid in offal instead of money,

so they had little choice but to make the best of it.

One restaurant keeping these historic flavours alive

and taking them into the 21st Century

is Santo Palato.

If you know how to cook offal, you can turn the poorest guts

into the richest of dishes...

[KATIE] We're hungry right?

-Starving. -Follow me.

I haven't eaten in like an hour.

...and Katie wants me to meet Sara,

a young chef with a growing reputation

for doing amazing things with innards.

-[SARA] Bonjourno. -[TUCCI] Stanley.

[KATIE] She's gonna make a frittata for us

and it's topped with chicken innards.

So everything we focus on here in your restaurant is offal.

-Yes. -Yes, good.

-One egg per person. OK. Yep. -Yes.

-...throughout the day. -Oh yeah.

Have it for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Yeah.

-I like it in a sandwich. -[TUCCI] Yes in a sandwich.

That's what I used to take when I was a kid to school.

Yeah. I'm very down with that.

Chef Sara gave up medical school

to pursue her dream of opening a restaurant.

[TUCCI] Woah, yes.

[TUCCI] So the stomach, the heart and the liver.

[SARA] Yes.

In Rome you find frittata and chicken organs, but separately.

-[TUCCI] But separately. -[KATIE] Yeah,

and she has combined them.

[KATIE] It's ready.

[TUCCI] Oh wow.

-[KATIE] Smell it. Wow, rich. -[TUCCI] Oh yeah that's nice.

Don't forget about this bread.

-Oh wow, yeah, nice and hot too. -[KATIE] So good. Yeah.

Mmm. That's great.

Thank you. [LAUGHS]

-Great. -This is really special.

And I think it's a really good demonstration

of what Sara does really well

which is taking Roman classic flavours and combining them...

-Yeah. Yeah. -...in a way that's new

but not like revolutionary or extra contemporary

they just make sense in the cuisine today.

Sara gets her scalpel into some beef heart

and we take a seat in the dining room.

What's that?

Really, this is a really unusual texture too isn't it?

Alright so if we break down what the offal are

we have heart, liver, lungs, stomach...

-Brain. -...brain,

-sweetbreads... -...intestines...

-...intestines... -...snout.

-Snout? -Cartilaginous things

-on the face? -Oh yeah.

The whole head really, if you think about it.

The whole head. Yeah.

If pasta is the first pillar of Roman food

the astonishing use of offal is definitely the second.

Somehow poor Romans turn these unpromising cuts

into sheer culinary poetry.

Yeah.

-[TUCCI] Dude, I love oxtail. -[KATIE] I'm so into it.

-[KATIE] So tasty. -That's really good.

And this is definitely a more carnivorous city than it is

-a fish eating city. -Without question, yeah.

-Even though we're 15 miles from the sea...

-I know. -That was really really far

in pre-1970s standards

before ice and refrigeration became more common.

[TUCCI] Yeah.

[KATIE] So this is that honeycomb tripe

with all those really beautiful pockets.

[KATIE] Lots of nice stomach geometry going on.

I've never heard it described as stomach geometry.

It makes it sound much, much more palatable.

-That is really good. -It's boiled multiple times

often with vinegar, that tenderises it and cleans it,

and then it's cooked in tomato sauce

with pecorino and mint.

-So in Rome... -Pecorino and mint?

Yeah. In Rome this is really the only way you find tripe,

in fact the dish is called ''Trippa alla Romana'

and go to another place, Florence included,

and the tripe is prepared differently.

Stewed stomach may not sound appealing, I know,

but believe me, these are really tasty flavours.

The Roman poor didn't have much to work with,

but against the odds, they wound up

making some of the very best food in the city.

What can I say? Thanks a lot. Thank you so much Katie.

Thank you, thank you.

We're here in Rome

and it's the most wonderful time of the year.

No, it's not Christmas,

it's artichoke season.

Right now, markets across the city

are humming with the sound of people

hacking away at Rome's favourite vegetable.

So show me the artichokes.

As I've been finding out, with Roman food,

you sometimes have to dig a little

to get to the good stuff.

So this is for the Carciofi Ro...

-Alla Romana. -...alla Romana.

Or alla Giudia

Once trimmed, they can be deep fried

to make one of my all-time favourite Roman foods.

Carciofi alla Giudia - Jewish fried artichokes.

You know my grandmother and my mother would make these.

Ask anyone here and they'll tell you

that this weird looking vegetable

is a definitive Roman food...

-Thank you so much. -Thank you.

-Bye-bye. -Ciao, ciao, ciao.

...but what I love is that under those rough outer leaves

it contains an entire history.

A story of how society's outcasts

can change the habits of an entire city.

These picturesque ruins

once contained the misery of Rome's Jewish ghetto.

From the 1500s onwards,

the city's entire Jewish community

was locked in this walled area,

only allowed to leave to do menial jobs in the daytime

before being locked in at night.

Italia Tagliacozzo is in her 80s

and has lived here her whole life.

When the Nazis seized Rome in October 1943,

the ghetto was a sitting target

and it's 1,204 residents were sent to the gas chambers.

Italia was one of just a handful who escaped

when her uncle hid her outside the city.

For the few who survived,

food became a vital link back to their past.

The Jews of Rome had lived in poverty for centuries

and were forced to rely on the cheapest of ingredients.

Using typical Roman inventiveness,

the Jews transformed unloved ingredients

like anchovies, eggplants and artichokes

into dishes that the entire city

would eventually take to its heart.

Alongside pasta and offal, the influence of Jewish cooking

is the third pillar of Roman cuisine today.

Italia set up a restaurant

serving the best Jewish food in the ghetto.

In this kitchen, Italia and her crack team

raise the humble artichoke into food for the ages.

-Georgio. -Georgio.

OK, so this is that

that was done yesterday -

cooked in the oil

and then refrigerated.

Alright so he's spreading out the leaves.

So cooked, pre-cooked

Look at how beautiful that is.

That's the best one I've had. That is delicious.

It's so addictive. It's like eating candy.

You just can't stop, it's so crispy.

That people love. Yeah.

This dish tells a story.

It has survived the darkest of times

and links us to a past that was almost wiped out.

To me it's a type of historical monument in Italian cooking,

now beloved by everyone,

and proudly embraced by the entire city.

It's my last night in Rome.

During my time here, I've learned that, above all else,

food in Italy is about who you are and where you're from.

But where does that leave you if you're an outsider?

I've come to Bistro 64,

a restaurant that has won a Michelin star for serving up

some of the best Italian food in the city.

The surprising thing is

that the chef is an out-of-towner...

...and no he's not from Naples,

or even Milan,

he's from Japan.

-Stanley. -Kotaro.

-Nice to meet you. -Pleasure. Nice to meet you too.

Kotaro Noda was lured here 20 years ago

by his obsession with the flavours of Italian cuisine.

Noda's food has won praise for its creativity

but tonight he's making the simplest Roman classic.

It's one of the famous Four Pastas,

cacio e pepe,

literally 'cheese and pepper.'

There are just three main ingredients

but it takes great skill

to make this Roman favourite perfect.

Of course, another Italian kitchen secret.

Could take a while.

I know you may be thinking this is ludicrously simple food

but believe me, it's extraordinary

and don't just take my word for it.

Where's Karen? Karen? Come here.

Right.

-OK. -OK. OK.

This is Karen who works with us,

one of the producers. She's from Rome.

-So you tell us what you think. -OK. OK. No pressure.

No. No pressure, no pressure. He's not nervous at all.

[NODA] I'm not nervous.

[TUCCI] He doesn't care about our opinion.

-[NODA] Va bene? -It's divine. Yes, it's so good.

It's perfectly creamy.

It's not too intense, it's not overloaded with flavour.

-Yeah. -It's the perfect

-amount of pepper... -Yeah.

And it really respects, you know,

how it would be cooked in a family.

There's always a secret.

There's always a secret, that's true. There's always a secret.

When it comes to food,

Romans know what they like and like what they know.

Beyond his masterful take on the classics

Noda's menu is full of incredible innovations,

from sweetbreads with heart

to purple potato cream with plum gelato.

I was curious how the city had taken to his creations.

The downside of Rome being so steeped in history

is that sometimes great things are resisted

because they're new and not what people are used to.

Missing food this good is a real shame.

I'm sorry.

But here's the thing -

the one thing Romans can't resist is a good meal

and I'm hopeful that soon

Noda's food will be another culinary landmark

in this eternal city.