Eating Rome: Living The Good Life In The Eternal City

Coffee, pizza, artichokes and grappa: For a resident of Rome, these familiar flavors beckon on every corner.

Popular food and travel blogger Elizabeth Minchilli knows all about it. Her latest book, Eating Rome: Living the Good Life in the Eternal City, is a potpourri of recipes, photos, historical insights and personal anecdotes.

I loved the book–but so did my daughter Jennifer.

Jenn’s got some first-hand experience at Detroit’s Avalon Bakery, and she’s quite the connoisseur of wines and ethnic cuisine. That’s why I invited Jennifer to tell you all about this colorful adventure through the land of pizza, prosciutto and penne pasta.

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EATING ROME: LIVING THE GOOD LIFE IN THE ETERNAL CITY

by Elizabeth Minchilli

A review by Jennifer Schiffer

Jennifer (left) with the family at a restaurant in Rome

This is a book filled with lighthearted and honest descriptions of the idiosyncratic delights to be expected when eating and drinking in Rome. Author Elizabeth Minchilli combines recipes, photos and reflections on Roman cuisine with advice about the customs and etiquette of Rome, offering the reader a pleasant tour through a city whose habits are at times very prescribed.

Whether describing savory meals or referencing her long history with Italy, Minchilli shows her love of the country and especially of Rome.

Another compelling aspect of the book is its charming and original photography.

Jennifer joins her brothers at the Roman Colosseum

Scanning the options–from espresso and gelato to the ubiquitous pasta–Minchilli helps her readers appreciate how Italians enjoy life’s pleasures and how easily they carve out the times and places to do so. This colorful book is easy yet compelling reading. It’s a free tour of an invigorating city, the legendary and larger-than-life Rome, and homebound readers will delight in learning new things about the romantic city they’ve seen on the big and small screens.

Minchilli’s imagery is halcyonic, never flowery. Your mouth waters as you read about gelato; and your brain boggles as you learn about the unwritten codes of Rome which Minchilli first discovered when she lived there with her family in the ’70s.

Minchilli thinks of Rome as the place where she’ll forever be an outsider, even as she knows restaurants and recipes by heart.

Eating Rome is a reference book, a light form of escapism, a travel narrative. The many levels on which it succeeds leave me sorry to turn the last page.