Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds. Oretta Zanini De Vita
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were converted into something else and their former use lost from memory. But in their time, they had an importance we would find hard to believe nowadays, with duties that today are unthinkable. For example, a 1675 edict stated that caporali82 must take peasants who fell ill,83 with all their belongings, to the nearest osteria that was not a hut but was instead built of masonry and had bedrooms. The landlord was to be given a form with the patient’s name and other information and was to provide the first treatment—something to eat. Often the main problem was hunger, for which the stock cure was a hearty bowl of soup, fresh eggs, and lemon balm (melissa), an herb with antipyretic properties. If the patient grew worse, the landlord was to take him personally to a hospital in Rome. The expenses of board and transport were reimbursed by the Elemosiniere di S.S.84 This edict had to be displayed outside the osteria. But malaria was fierce, and too often the dead were buried in the countryside by the peasants themselves, or by the landlord near the osteria.
In the agro, the larders of the osterias were especially precious during the growing season: here the caporali got supplies for the peasants’ meals; and when the osteria was near the fields, the workers would often go in person for supplies.
The hospitality situation in Rome was different. As the capital of Christianity, Rome has always been thronged by pilgrims, which explains why there have been so many taverns and osterias ever since the Middle Ages.
The historian Giovanni Villani, in his Croniche, tells that on the occasion of the jubilee year decreed by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300, some two million pilgrims came to Rome: “A large number of the Christians who were then living made the pilgrimage, both women and men, from distant and different countries, far and near. And it was the most marvelous thing ever seen, that all the year round in Rome, in addition to the Roman people, two hundred thousand pilgrims, not counting those who were on the road going and returning, all were supplied and content with their victuals . . . both the horses and the people.”
Even if we cannot verify the number of travelers, it is easy enough to imagine how, on occasions of the kind, the city turned into one immense tavern, particularly since the less well-off Romans took the opportunity to rent their own beds and their own spaces.
Until the eighteenth century, no distinction was made between a tavern and an osteria, since the place of refreshment coincided with the place in which one could eat, drink, sleep, and lodge one’s horses.
Since the number of taverns and osterias fluctuated, depending on a given year’s feasts and holy days, this may be why Rome remained—from the fifteenth century nearly through the nineteenth—the city with the best hotel service and at competitive prices. In the middle of the sixteenth century, a room rented for two scudi a month, equal to about seven euros today.
A 1526 census of the crafts and trades practiced in the city documents 236 hoteliers and innkeepers, 134 bakery shops, 100 salami shops (which also sold dairy products and dried meats), 90 spice sellers (who also served as pharmacists), 88 butchers, 76 gardeners and vineyardists, and 58 water sellers.
Inns and osterias, like all other commercial establishments, had signs outside, or pictures painted on the walls or doors, so that potential customers, most of whom were illiterate, could recognize the place. Thus we have the osteria of the Bear (near Piazza Navona and still in business today as one of Rome’s most elegant restaurants, Hostaria dell’Orso), the osteria of the Golden Dragon, the Elephant, the Helmet, the Two Swords, the Two Towers—all names corresponding
Osteria del Tempo Perso (literally, “wineshop of wasted time”), Via Ardeatina, Rome (Fondazione Primoli, Rome)
to easily recognizable emblems. These were the so-called talking signs for those who could not read.
The specialty of the osteria of the Falcon, in Piazza Sant’Eustachio, was a rice and giblet timballo. The trattoria of the Rooster, near present-day Via del Tritone, gave credit and served a special pot roast85 of turkey.
Montaigne, who made his “journey to Italy” in 1580–81, stopped at the Orso. Extending his stay, he rented an apartment in the city center consisting of four luxuriously appointed rooms, with kitchen and pantry. The price of twenty scudi per month (about eighty euros today) included linens, wood for heating, cook, and stable service.86
Well-off pilgrims usually lodged with prominent families, since they were unlikely to venture to Rome without a letter of introduction to some acquaintance or religious order. Those who did not have introductions, friends in the city, or the money to sleep in a tavern found shelter in the porticoes of churches or palaces, where they often slept with plenty of company.
Pilgrims were not the only travelers to Rome. There were always emissaries of princes and rulers coming and going, especially during papal elections, not to mention merchants, businessmen, adventurers, writers and artists in search of patrons, and courtesans. Tourists, in the modern sense of the term, began to arrive around the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, single rooms in taverns were extremely rare, and people slept in crowded and mixed-gender conditions. The travelers’ servants slept where they could, in the corridors, under the stairs, in the stable with the horses, or on guard in front of the master’s door.
A census in the middle of the nineteenth century counted 217 osterias, 29 trattorias, 217 cafés, 37 inns, and 40 hotels in Rome.
Until the first decades of the twentieth century, the taverns and osterias offered simple and genuine home cooking, consisting exclusively of typical dishes of the Latian tradition. A carafe of common table wine always accompanied the meal. The city’s vineyards provided plenty of wine, and one of the best was produced by the vineyards on the Via Nomentana adjacent to the basilica of Sant’Agnese. Some of the wine people drank in the osterias came, however, from southern Italy, and was unloaded in large barrels at the ports of Ripa Grande. This full-bodied wine was also used for blending with other wines.
Most of what we would call table wine came to Rome from the Castelli Romani, transported on special horse-drawn carts that carried eight barrels of sixty liters (about fifteen gallons) each. They traveled at night in order to have enough time to restock all the osterias, and it was not uncommon in the darkness to encounter a cart parked along the side of the road, while the exhausted driver caught forty winks, in the company of his dog, who slept under the wagon.
Since antiquity, publicans and innkeepers, divided in separate corporations, or guilds, were regulated by their own statutes, which prohibited, for example, standing at the city gates to solicit customers. This practice was so widespread that some provident innkeepers sent their employees as far away as Formia and Gaeta, which were the first large towns at the gates of the Kingdom of Naples. The innkeeper was obliged to report the arrival and departure of guests, while a special Roman police force gave publicans and tavern operators licenses to do business.
The osterias had special hours, staying open into the night, which gave rise to legitimate protests by nearby citizens who were trying to sleep. This is documented by the historian Gregorovius, with a letter sent by the Romans to Pope John XXII, in Avignon, to protest against the young clerics who frequented the osterias at night and whose rackets and brawls disturbed the peace.
The custom of decorating the doors of osterias with wreaths and branches (frasche, in Italian, from which comes the name frasca or fraschetta for a place where wine is sold) dates back to the Middle Ages. The custom lasted until our own day, when just before World War II, it was still common for someone strolling through old Rome, and not just colorful Trastevere, to encounter a vegetal sign. The family still went to the osteria, toting its own meal tied up in a large tablecloth. The innkeeper served a fragrant wine from the Castelli. This service was called “bread and cover” and survives as the cover charge, pane e coperto, in Italian restaurants today.
Those who did not bring their food from home could buy a snack from the ambulant peddlers who wandered through the city shouting the name of their product. There were the