ROME – SIMPOSIO Recipes, Stories & the Layered Soul of an Eternal City This is not a typical Roman cookbook. ROME explores the Eternal City through food as a language of continuity, contradiction, and daily life. Here, cooking is not a monument to tradition, but a living practice shaped by gods and markets, feasts and hunger, excess and restraint. Rome is approached not through postcard icons, but through kitchens, streets, rituals, and memories where ancient and modern, sacred and profane, have always overlapped. Recipes emerge from a city built in layers—where everyday food carries echoes of pagan celebrations, imperial habits, and popular resilience. This book was shaped by living in Rome and moving through its neighborhoods—following instinct, observation, and historical traces, then pursuing each detail as it opened into another, like a rabbit hole. A meat dish leads to ancient cults, a dessert to domestic ritual, a feast to Saturnalia and popular celebration. ROME is not : a generic introduction to Roman cuisine - a tourist guide disguised as a cookbook - a simplified collection of iconic pasta dishes It is a cultural monograph told through food, combining local recipes, mythology, history, and lived observation. — Rome is a city where food has always belonged to the people. Its cuisine reflects adaptability, humor, and survival—built on simple ingredients transformed through repetition and skill. This volume includes fully contextualized Roman recipes accompanied by essays on ancient gods, popular festivals, Saturnalia, neighborhood life, and everyday rituals. Recipes include saltimbocca , traditional meat and vegetable dishes, and desserts such as ricotta crostata , each presented as part of a broader cultural and historical system rather than isolated instructions. Recipes function as cultural keys: each dish exists for a reason, in a specific place, within a specific moment of Rome’s long history. This book is for readers who love Italy but want to understand it beyond stereotypes; for slow travelers, cooks who read, and readers who cook. It is also for those with Italian heritage who seek to reconnect with Rome through depth, context, and everyday tradition rather than nostalgia. ROME is part of SIMPOSIO , a collection of travel cookbooks dedicated to Italy. Each volume is autonomous, yet incomplete on its own—chapters of a larger journey through food, territory, and everyday life. A book to read, to cook from, and to keep. An invitation to step into Rome’s streets, kitchens, and centuries—one dish at a time.