more tales from the past: a visit to Sermoneta

The courtyard of the medieval castle in Sermoneta, Italia

Here's another entry from the home page I kept while living in Rome in 2001-2002. I used to do little trips around Lazio with my friends Roberto and Rachel once in a while--this was one such excursion.

12/3/2001
This past weekend I went to the tiny hillside village of Sermoneta, not too far south of Rome, with Roberto and Rachel for Rachel’s birthday. It was good timing for me because I’d been wanting to get away for awhile. Surprisingly my guidebook says very little about the town, but Roberto says it is quite popular with Romans for day trips.

When we got in we were starving, so we went to the first trattoria we saw, called the Black Rose. It was good food but we were there for about 45 minutes before our first courses came! I had some really great tortellone filled with porcini mushrooms and truffles, and lamb for a secondo. Rachel had tortellone filled with vegetables and ricotta, but I liked mine better.

We walked about for a bit afterward. There aren’t too many people in Sermoneta, and we couldn’t even find an ATM! It’s very hilly so we did a lot of walking up and down. For dinner we went to Il Mulino, which advertised as its specialty ‘pollo Lucrezia Borgia,’ aka chicken a la Lucrezia Borgia. Roberto asked what it was but they said it was a secret. (Lucrezia was poisoned—yikes!) [Note: I got my facts wrong here--she was rumored to poison other people.] He did order it but I’m not sure we ever figured out what the sauce was—maybe egg and something else. I was still kind of stuffed from lunch and so had homemade fettucine with ragu, and a salad. For dessert I had crepes filled with ice cream with fruit on top. Mm. The proprietor was a sweet old guy and he gave us some amaro on the house. There wasn’t much to do afterward except walk around again and look at the stars. It was really quiet! You couldn’t even hear the highway too well, surprising since it’s not exactly in the middle of nowhere, like towns in Tuscany. It was nice to listen to owls hooting and bats clicking. Except in my room I kept hearing this weird tapping noise, which I became convinced was a ghost. Well, I thought it was probably my bed or the heater, but I couldn’t quite locate the source. It woke me up around 4 or 5 and I couldn’t get back to bed. Aside from being a little freaked out by the sound, I was bothered by the fact that it wasn’t on regular beats, so I was always waiting for another tap. I thought, if this gets worse I’m going to knock on Rachel and Roberto’s door, because they had an extra bed in their room! Instead I just dug around and found some earplugs. I did still hear some even louder sounds a few times but I was determined to ignore the ghost, and so managed to fall asleep until Rachel woke me up at 10 for breakfast. I was surprised she beat me up—R and R are always saying they sleep til 12 on weekends. But she had actually woken up at 8!

We ran up to the castle for the hourly tour. It was actually pretty impressive and well preserved. The Caetani family used to own it, and after they died out in the 1980s a private foundation they started ran it. I guess at some point it was also owned by the Borgias, and Lucrezia Borgia lived there (hence the chicken). There was a hole where they used to pour actual boiling oil on invaders, a covered passageway by which the soldiers walked from one lookout point to the other if they were under attack, some pretty frescoes in the private rooms by a pupil of Pinturicchio’s, etc etc.

When we left we decided to take a detour to the neighboring (and much larger) town of Norma. This was not very interesting; indeed it was a bit decrepit and grim, looking like it had just survived the war. So we headed over to Antica Norba, the ruins of the Roman settlement. This was actually quite nice. There are really only foundations and the like left, stones scattered all about, but there were some great views to the west, all the way out to the sea. Plus there were sheep, who every time I got withing 20 feet of them skittered away en masse, cowbells (or is that sheep bells) clanging, and hanggliders up there! That looked wonderful, like flying. One guy came quite near to us, so that we could hear him whistling.

Then we were starving, so we just managed to squeak in to a restaurant for lunch. I had some great prosciutto, salami, cheese, olives, and bruschetta for an appetizer, then some good veal. Dessert was torta al limone. Quite good. There were a few families having Sunday brunch there, including one that was an 80th birthday party for nonna, who at some points looked like she was going to plop face-first into her plate. Then it was a long drive home, and R and R were kind enough to drive me all the way home, even though I said they should just drop me off at the metro stop. Those guys are the best. We were all tired, and then they had to go right to Roberto’s mom’s house for another birthday fest for Rachel! Yes, being feted is tough.