The Best Place to Eat in Rome is in an Italian Home

How eating dinner with a local Italian family made me reflect on American dinner traditions.

I am from the United States and have lived in the same home my entire life. My mother's family all live within ten minutes of me, so family dinners are fairly common. I truly find joy in sitting around a table with people and sharing a meal, so getting the chance to experience a family dinner in Italy was incredible.

In the fall of 2017, I went abroad to Italy for four months. When my mother, father, and grandmother came to visit, we planned a weekend in Rome together. My father works at IBM in America, and he had a colleague in Rome that he knew. He reached out to his colleague and told him of our plans to visit the city. The colleague graciously invited us over for dinner for our first night in the city. I was excited but had truly no idea what to expect. For the most part, I assumed dinner would be fairly similar to that in America.

My father's colleague had two daughters, one slightly older than me and one slightly younger. Their mother was also there, as well as the grandmother. My father's colleague spoke fluent English, the daughters spoke it fairly well, the mother less, and the grandmother none at all. I had been taking an Italian language class as a part of my academics abroad, but I was nowhere near good enough to hold a conversation. But despite that, conversation flowed normally. The daughters translated for the mother and grandmother, and the father translated their Italian for us.

All smiles after dinner

I'll never forget the tears in my grandmother's eyes when she met the daughter's grandmother. Despite both being grandmothers for girls around the same age, the Italian grandmother was significantly older than my own, enough to be my grandmother's mother. My grandmother's family immigrated from Italy to America, so Italian being spoken at the dinner table was something my grandmother had grown up with (although she was not fluent in it). My grandmother was instantly reminded of her childhood by being with this family, and watching her get emotional had me wishing I was connected to my heritage the way my grandmother was. My grandmother is a proud Italian, but my heritage has become muddled with time. Dinner hadn't even started yet, but I already knew how much it meant to my grandmother that we got to do this.

One thing that shocked me was the dynamic of who helps out and who sits down in setting the table and preparing the meal. In my family's dinners, my grandmother is normally the one cooking and telling us to sit down. This family did the opposite, with the daughters helping cook and telling the grandmother to sit at the table. The mother stayed in the kitchen for the first half of dinner, cooking each course while we ate. In my family, it is rude to eat before everyone is seated.

The way food was served was also something unusual to me. In most family circumstances for me, meals are served in three courses: first, appetizers. You don't sit for appetizers, but rather they're put on the coffee table or counter and everyone nibbles on them. Then, everyone is seated and every dish that has been cooked is placed on the table. Dishes get passed around and loaded with food. After eating and some time for digesting, the table is cleared and dessert is brought out.

In Rome, we were all seated when the first course was brought out for us to eat. It was a plate of meats and cheese, something I had grown used to after spending two months in Italy. Afterwards, the daughters cleared the table and brought out homemade gnocchi. My entire family thought the gnocchi was the only meal, so they ate all of the food on our plates, quickly filling their stomachs. But when the gnocchi was finished, the girls cleared the table again and then brought out a meat dish. And after that, plates of vegetables were given to us. And after that, a giant, home-made cake was placed on the table. I had been full after the second course, but the food was so good that I couldn't stop. In hindsight, we probably put the same amount of food on the table for our family dinners, but you only plate as much as you would like to eat.

I have never been someone who eats a lot at one meal. With my own family, they have always been aware of this and never put too much food on my plate because they know I won't eat it all. Italy has a very different outlook on eating, though. One of my Italian professors told me that how you tell a happy husband from an unhappy one is based on how big he is. Throughout the entire meal, the Italian grandmother kept saying, "Eat! Eat!" in Italian or would ask her granddaughters translate. She felt that I was too skinny and didn't eat enough. I tried to explain that I get full really quickly, but it fell on deaf ears. My grandmother and mother loved this, telling me how my great-grandmother used to do the same to my mother when she was younger.

When the meal was finished, my family insisted that should my father's colleague and his family ever come to the Boston area, we would happily host them for dinner. The idea of this got me thinking, though--what is the American dinner? What would we cook for them, and how would it be served? When I think of traditional "American" foods, I end up picturing burgers and wings and pizza. There's southern comfort food, but my family has no connection to the south. Typical meals for us are steak tips on the grill, spaghetti and meatballs, and roast beef with potatoes. To me, these meals don't feel uniquely American, but they are the meals I associate with my family.

If I had never had this meal in Rome, I never would have questioned my own culture of eating. I blindly assumed that, in general, American and Western European countries ate fairly similarly. After this experience, I have gained a better understanding of what it is like to live and eat in Italy. Despite my four months in Italy, my time with this family was the most authentic Italian experience I had. This dinner was one of my favorite moments of the semester, and in the future I hope to gain more authentic experiences by connecting with locals again.

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