Why not every trattoria should be written about

There is a gentle, melancholy beauty in nameless taverns. I’m especially fond of one: it stands a few steps from my house, and just as close to my heart. It doesn’t match the usual image of the trattoria run by two elderly owners, yet it has that timeless, trendless air. It never dresses itself up and never brags about anything: not about its more than 100 years of life, nor about the people who walk through its doors. You’ll find university professors and groups of students, restaurateurs, cooks, labourers, travellers passing through and others who are practically fixtures: at lunchtime it’s always full, and there are many familiar faces.

At one point Gus Van Sant shot a short film there for Gucci, during Alessandro Michele’s tenure, with Silvia Calderoli and an incredible group of international talents. The sort of thing one could boast about for years afterwards—yet here, no, nothing at all. It’s an honest tavern where people eat alone or in company, and everyone gets a simple greeting, a conversation if needed, a kind of cordiality that isn’t made of big smiles but of straightforward openness, of exchanges that are never forced. I like this not owing anything to anyone, this warm and effortless familiarity; I like, too, that the tablecloth is paper but the napkin is fabric: a courtesy offered with great discretion.

Home cooking

It’s not the kind of place where people end up 'singing in excess', but a home you return to again and again. The cooking is homely —simple, even simpler than trattoria fare: if there’s broth among the first courses, there will also be boiled hen among the seconds. And you’ll always find plenty of broths, soups and stews, even minestrone now and then, and then rice with endive or tiny pasta squares with peas, pasta and chickpeas on Fridays because Roman cooking — Roman home cooking — is made of soups that aren’t sumptuous but warm and affectionate, that comfort you from the sadness of the first cold days and melt it into melancholy.

Every now and then they throw in something a bit frivolous, and you just step over it without fuss, because most of the dishes don’t seek to impress: whether it’s lamb’s head, lemon scaloppine or boiled potatoes that soothe my soul. And here I choose them with gratitude, because in the end, caresses—even those of taste—are best accepted from those who don’t give them as a profession. The buffet is one of the things I like most: vegetables on one side and desserts on the other, castagnaccio in season, fruit above, which is never missing. You ask what fruit there is and they answer: apples, oranges, bananas — it depends on the season. There are taverns like this all over Italy, and this one — truth be told — does have a name, but people guard it like a secret, fearing not so much that it might lose its soul to sudden fame, but that it might be violated by someone who doesn’t know how to look at it with the necessary delicacy.