When in Rome, Learn to Cook Italian.
If you go to Rome to dine, you’re getting only a taste
of Italian culture. For a full immersion, you’ve got
to make some pasta and traditional sauces yourself.
For me, visiting Italy is a bittersweet experience. The sweetness comes from knowing that virtually everything I taste — from the morning’s first expertly pulled espresso to the sip of limoncello in the trattoria at evening’s end — will be intensely memorable. The bitterness comes later, usually when the plane has left Leonardo da Vinci airport and I’m confronting the minor insult of the in-flight meal, and the tiny tragedy of my first sip of reheated filter coffee. By then it’s already too late: Once again, I’ve left Rome behind, and the sprezzatura has started to drain from my day.
It’s a maddening hallmark of the culture. Italians, who are extraordinarily good at elevating simple tastes and textures into the realm of the extraordinary, will also go to great efforts to make the whole process look effortless. Five hundred years ago, the humanist author Baldassare Castiglione labeled such studied nonchalance “sprezzatura,” from the verb meaning “to undervalue.” “We may call that art true art,” he wrote in “The Book of the Courtier,” “which does not seem to be art.” For a gracious nobleman in Renaissance Urbino, that meant being able to finish dancing the most elaborate saltarello with a double hop and a self-deprecatory shrug.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/travel/rome-italian-recipes.html?
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