How different are Italy's farmers' markets from California's? Having
morphed into an Angeleno over the last few years, it's a tough question
to answer, especially comparing swank Los Angeles and central Roma. In
Larchmont, land of Yuppified Hollywood, you can find, on a Sunday
morning, some of the freshest farmers' purple cauliflower, blood
oranges (well, no longer this week), meyer lemons, and fava beans. But
today, in Roma's Campo dei Fiori, all was alive and well even if I
could not find blood oranges there either. I admit that I moved to
California from New York after a decade-long love affair with Italy.
For me, it was an escape from Washington Heights to America's Italia. I
found even Hollywood (well, its hills and lemons) Italian. Still, while I didn't
today venture so far into the unvisited Roma as my T+L colleague Gary Shteyngart
did last year in Testaccio (Campo dei Fiori is, after all, one of Roma's most famous
markets, filled with tourists and lame ristorantes selling everything
from panini to "real, Italian" pizza and gelato as well as an amatriciana and carbonara
for the Carmella Sopranos of the world), it was nice to be in the
company of some fresh zucchini flowers, yelping fish salesmen, and
plant seeds that honestly declared their status as "semi-Italian." What
that means, I am not sure. But how many people in Los Angeles are from
Southern California? And just where did they get their blood orange
varietals? Allora...--AB
