Pizza al taglio
Today, Saturday, we needed some downtime after a busy/stressful time of late, so we relaxed in our AirBnb all day and then went out for dinner at a local pizzeria a short walk away.
On one hand, it felt somewhat outrageous to "waste" one of our three full days in Rome (which has the most expensive accommodation of our whole trip, even without factoring in the replacement phone expense!). On the other hand, we're learning to let go of that feeling and respond to the needs of the moment!
Anyway, I found out (after googling it just now) that the Roman way of making and selling pizza is called "pizza al taglio", which means "pizza by the cut". This pizza is rectangular, can have a wide variety of toppings, is cut into square or rectangular pieces of the size you want, and is sold by weight. Then it's heated up if you're dining in.
The friendly server didn't speak any English, which is how we know we were truly at a local place and not a tourist trap! But the customer waiting behind us — a long-haired youngish man taking his beautiful dog for a walk (dogs are allowed in shops here) — willingly translated for us, described lots of the pizza toppings and made recommendations. We got some interesting ones (see feature pic above)!
The pizza was nice, but not amazing. B and I both preferred the Neopolitan style pizzas we had in Naples AND the fried pasta freebies over the pizza tonight! But it was a treat to encounter such lovely locals and engage in the fun of trying to make ourselves understood with our brief English, garbled Italian, embarrassed smiles and lots of "grazies" ("thank yous")!
After we'd eaten, we got F to go and ask for "una scatola, per favore" (freshly googled translation of "one box, please") for our leftovers — a successful mission that was promptly rewarded with the requested box. 😊
