Food. Glorious food. Pure food. Real food. Food that you can taste just by looking at it. Food that you never knew could smell so fresh and look so perfectly beautiful. This is the food that was always featured on the Travel Channel, before Travel Channel morphed into bizarre bullshit that has nothing at all to do with travel. It's the food that you would swear must be Photoshopped.
Tomatoes by the thousands. Cherry tomatoes; dazzling, little crimson orbs hang in clusters from the top rails of booths and look down at their larger, plump cousins of different varieties and colors; bright red, green, purple, black, and some decorated with stripes of orange. A sea of green vegetables broken up by islands of bright orange carrots and gleaming yellow and red peppers and gleaming purple eggplant. It's autumn in Rome and seemingly bottomless baskets of chestnuts are surrounded by a variety of squashes.
Butchers wielding razor sharp knives slice steaks from giant roasts and with their mallets pound slices of veal paper thin. There's a boundless selection of meats here, where the butcher is as likely to have rabbit in his case as he is pork chops.
At the fishmongers, there are fish and seafoods of untold varieties, colors and sizes; filets, steaks, roasts and whole fish. While the variety is endless, there is one thing that they all have in common. These fish stare, in their eternal repose, through eyes as clean and clear as newly polished glass, just as they did when they swam alive and free. That's how you know that the fish here is as fresh as you'll get.
Over on the other side of the great hall, a tall slender young woman made even taller by her deadlocked hair that's stacked and bound in a burnt orange scarf, slices strips of lasagna from a giant sheet of fresh pasta. The girl stacks the strips on a scale and looks to the attentive customer for approval. The customer, a middle aged woman, pauses for a moment of serious consideration and then points at the sheet. "Di piu, (more)" says the customer. The girl slices a couple more strips, pauses, and glances back at the customer. "Va bene (is that good)?"
"Bene," the customer.
At the delicatessen, rows of whole shanks of prosciutto hang above display cases filled with cheeses of all types and textures. The deli man reaches up and snips some sausage links from a meters long, coiled rope of goodness that dangles over a display of salamis; sopressata, calabrese, finocchiona, and, of course, a great log of mortadella, it's face daubed with slivers of pistachio and splats of fat.
This, is Mercato Trionfale, just a short walk from Vatican City in Rome.
At one of these deli booths a young woman deftly shaves slices of paper thin prosciutto from a whole shank. Back home in America the prosciutto is sliced on an electric slicer somewhere in the nether regions of the deli section. Here at Trionfale, it's done in front of the booth, where the young woman puts on a show, wielding a scalpel sharp knife with the concentration and precision of a surgeon.
Bottles and tins of olive oil rest on shelves behind stacked jars of olives, condiments and preserves. Wine merchants offer wines from Piedmont, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Liguria. There are breads, pastries, dried fruits and rolling hills of bulk spices. Mercato Trionfale is an homage to all that's good and right about food.
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