When I was twelve years old, I decided I wanted to go away to camp. I’m not quite sure where this desire came from, since I was far from sporty. I was definitely the one who was picked last for soccer and the entire idea of dodgeball still gives me nightmares. So it couldn’t have been the lure of water-skiing or canoeing that made me think I’d like to spend two months by a cold lake in Wisconsin. I think I must have been more attracted to the idea of s’mores by the campfire and perfecting the baked beans I had learned how to make at a Girl Scout cookout.
Once I got to camp I soon realized my mistake. After failing to ever stand up on my water skis and downright refusing to go for any frigid 6:00 a.m. wake-up swims, I tried to stay in the craft house, working on my ceramic and weaving skills while counting the days until I could finally return home and get back to the life I knew and loved in St. Louis.
While I was away at camp my parents decided to go on their version of camp as well. A three-week trip to Europe for the first time took them to Venice, Florence, and Rome. It was 1972 and Italy must have appeared to be almost like a different planet from suburban St. Louis. The language, the food, the life was like nothing they had ever seen. Rather than take home simple souvenirs of their time in Italy, they took home a plan, which they shared with me on my first day back at home from camp.
As I was happily unpacking my trunk, my mother came in to tell me that I’d soon be packing it again. “We’re moving to Italy,” she said. My father had sold his business, an art gallery, to our next-door neighbor, and the house where I had grown up was already rented to another family. They were arriving on September 1. And we were leaving.
How they had the courage to pick up three young children and move to a country where they didn’t speak the language and knew no one is beyond me. I am pretty sure my grandparents thought they were insane. I know I did.
I was aghast. My school, my friends, my Barbies! Everything that I knew, and that I had desperately missed over the two months spent at camp, was being ripped away from me. But as I dried my tears and packed my Barbies (there was at least that small comfort) I got ready for what was to be one of the most important events in my life.
While there were the usual hiccups of moving to any new city—missing the school bus on the first day; making new friends—I soon shed the fears and misgivings that any twelve-year-old would have, and traded them in for a head-over-heels, lifelong love affair with this ancient city. Although we only spent two years living in Rome, they were impressionable ones. Many of the strongest memories I have from my childhood date from this time, and—not surprisingly—most of them have to do with food. The discovery of pizza bianca, hot from the corner bakery; the sharp smell of piles of artichokes in the open market; a cone filled with melon gelato that was like biting into the sweetest, juiciest piece of fruit I’d ever had. Food has been one of the most important things in my life for as long as I can remember. And my relationship with eating, cooking, shopping, and feeding my family is intricately tied to the rhythms and traditions of this ancient city.
I came back to Rome—and to Europe and Italy—as often as I could over the following years, not only for vacations during the summers with my family but also for several semesters abroad in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy while studying French, German, Spanish, and Italian.
Eventually, I moved here on my own. In graduate school I chose my topic well: Sixteenth-century garden architecture would essentially guarantee that I would spend at least two years in Italy. I applied for and received a grant that allowed me to read my way through Medici documents in the archives in Florence. My mornings were spent sorting through ancient shopping lists and architectural sketches in a back room at the Uffizi. Afternoons were spent not only writing but also shopping, cooking, and wandering through the cobblestoned streets of Florence and the surrounding Tuscan countryside.
After two perfect years, my time in Florence ran out. I had finished my research and now had to face the facts (a) I had to actually write the dissertation, (b) I had to move back to the United States, and (c) if everything went according to plan I would hopefully get a job teaching art history at some university far from where I really wanted to be: Italy.
So I was already rethinking my commitment to academia when the inevitable happened. I met and fell in love with the Italian man of my dreams: Domenico. I left Florence and settled down permanently in the city I had always truly considered home in my heart: Rome.
In very quick succession, I found myself with an Italian husband, an Italian dog, an Italian home, an Italian baby, and a brand-new job in Italy. A friend had recently launched an art newspaper in New York and asked me to begin contributing features for the magazine section. I figured that since I was just sitting around being pregnant, why not?
After four of my features appeared on the cover, a check arrived in the mail. My shock was considerable. After eight years of graduate school, I didn’t realize that you could write about art and actually get paid to do so. I could do this for a living!
I soon expanded my coverage to include interior design and architecture as well as travel, food, gardens, and just about any other lifestyle topic that came my way, for publications such as Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Town & Country, and The Financial Times. At the same time, I began writing big, fancy coffee-table books about beautiful things like Tuscan villas, Umbrian castles, and handmade ceramics.
It was when it came time to publicize my last book, Italian Rustic, that my publisher suggested the trifecta of Facebook, Twitter, and blogging. After a life spent writing away in the solitude of my own little garret in Rome, I found the wide world of social media exciting and inspiring. Although I had been writing all of my life, I had never had direct contact with my audience.
At the beginning I had a hard time wrapping my head around what I wanted to say on my blog. Coming from a professional world of detailed assignments, it was difficult to know exactly how to frame it. So, rather than make any decision, I just decided to record what I was up to, day by day.
As it turns out, most of what I do, every single day, has a lot to do with food, and since I am living in Rome, the city provided a framework. So while I never planned to write a food blog from this ancient city, that is exactly what it turned out to be. My blog, Elizabeth Minchilli in Rome, lets me share what I love best—eating, traveling, cooking, and all sorts of other good stuff. My Eat Italy apps, Eat Rome, Eat Florence, and Eat Venice, are guides to my favorite restaurants, coffee bars, markets, and gelaterie in those cities.
Eating Rome is my homage to the city that feeds me—literally and figuratively. It is a personal, quirky, and (I hope) fun look at the city through my own food-focused vision. This is how I experience Rome, day by day, bite by bite.