banane e fragolini

I'm trying to knock something off of my Italian Bucket List every weekend so Meganne and I decided to go to Nemi for the day. It's less than an hour south of Rome but it's pretty tough to get to by public transport alone so we decided to rent a car. When we drove down to the Amalfi Coast a few weeks back we had a pretty decent car, a Fiat Punto. I mean, it's Italian made and everything so it's kind of junk but at least it had a good sound system and was slightly responsive. When I went to rent the car the lady told me that I was getting a brand new car with only 6 kilometers! We were like, "Sweet, new car!" We proceeded to head up stairs, key in hand, we passed it off to the guy running the company's lot and we asked him which one it was. He didn't know so he pressed the button on the key to unlock it. The lights flashed on the ONLY yellow car in the lot! NO!!! A freaking banana yellow Fiat Panda! Unfortunately, the photo really doesn't do justice to its true banananess.

Even better was the interior, sky blue with a dark blue racing strip! It's purely coincidence that my sweater matched the interior. Meganne had a good laugh at my expense.
Keep in mind that the Fiat Panda is actually credited as the car that brought Fiat back to being a 'good' company (Was it ever?). The Panda brought many stylistic changes, blah, blah, blah. If this is the car that brought the company back then I can only imagine what the previous generations of Pandas are like. Now that Fiat and Chrysler have a partnership going you may see a Panda in a neighborhood near you. Really, this Panda should be extinct. In fact, just about every time traffic was slow while driving in and around the Amalfi Coast, it was a Panda holding it up.

But on to the good stuff. We stopped in San Cesareo for lunch. There is a place called Osteria Di San Cesareo that I had wanted to go to for about two years. When we walked in we were greeted by the Chef, a mountain of a woman but really friendly and the server, who had already hit on Meganne on the phone and was even happier to see her in person. It was totally worth the wait and the smile from the server. The menu is not only written in Roman but is completely Roman in terms of food. The food is heavily influenced by the Jewish-Roman cooking and by the Quinto Quarto, meaning the innards and guts or the more pleasant sounding "sweet breads". The wealthy took all of the good stuff and left the rest for the Plebs. We had Coratella con Cipolle, which is the heart, lungs and the liver of a young lamb cooked with onions. It was delicious. Meganne opted for the classic Amatriciana with homemade pasta, which is a tomato sauce with cured pig jowls and pecorino cheese. I had the Rigatoni co la Pajata which a tomato sauce and the the intestines of a young lamb, killed right after it fed upon it's mother's milk and topped with plenty of pecorino cheese. Mine was also great. We decided against dessert because we wanted to hit the road to Nemi and have some strawberry gelato for dessert.

Nemi is famous for tiny, wild strawberries. Along with some gelato, we also had two little desserts typical of Nemi. The town overlooks a beautiful lake, unfortunately for us, the day was overcast and a bit rainy so we didn't get to watch the sunset as I had hoped. Oh well, it was a great day nonetheless.


We drove The Banana back to the car company and vowed to never be seen in a yellow car again.