Check out the cool “antichita” shop we found on the streets of Rome! The smell and feel of the cluttered piles of one man’s junk made me feel right at home. Unfortunately there wasn’t anything that we felt drawn to lug back home through customs in our bags but I knew I had to share this awesome find with my piddlin’ friends the moment I laid eyes on it! Add another pin to the map!
Okay- now take a look at my favorite little gelateria in all of Italy.
This is the first place I tasted authentic Italian gelato…and it started a serious love affair. My first order (to overcome what seemed to be an incurable jetlag on our first day in Roma): “mango” with “crema” and it came with a delicious wafer to boot! I found myself looking for more mango gelato at every stop on our trip -no, really- everytime we passed a gelateria, I asked Ryan…do you think they have “mango!?” and then I would usually have to settle on another flavor. It goes without saying that I also made sure to get back for more mango upon our return to Rome, as no flavor in any of our other stops seemed to satiate the craving I had for this utterly fresh flavor of the first mango fruit gelato. When we finally got back around to this side of Rome, alas, the mango was gone, and I enjoyed stracciatella instead. WOW- here is a quick description of this amazing flavor thanks to a quick wiki search: “In Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, Spain, Croatia, Germany, Slovenia and the Netherlands, gelato with a vanilla base and chocolate shavings is also called stracciatella. It is somewhat analogous to chocolate chip ice cream in North America though the chocolate is intended to be less chunky and more integrated with the gelato. It was invented in 1962 by Enrico Panattoni, the owner of the “La Marianna”, a gelateria in Bergamo in northern Italy.”
It capped off my Italian gelato taste fest! Just—look at it! It was a MESS and it was DELICIOUS! We loitered around the nearby Piazza Navona (gorgeous-and one of our favorite little spots), gelatos in hand and savored every morsel.
| keep piddlin’
piddlin' 