Michael had the day off on Friday and we had lots of plans of things to go and see, but both of us were feeling under the weather (slight cold) so we ended up spending most of the day watching DVD’s and napping. We did go out for the obligatory espresso, followed by gelato, followed by a bit of grocery shopping.
In the evening we had a dinner with Maretta, her husband Claudio, son Guiddo, and some of their friends from New York. “I Quattro Mori” was the restaurant of choice, apparently frequented by the current Pope. The food is cooked Sardinian style and there is no menu. You simply tell them if your table wants fish or meat and the food starts coming!!!! Our table selected fish…..
First came the anti-pasta…..probably 8 or more small helpings of various kinds of fish. Not being a huge fish connoisseur I couldn’t tell what all we were eating, but it was ALL good. We had salmon, sardines, octopus, fried minnow sized fish (heads, tails and everything in between), Calamari, clams, oysters and Sea Urchin.
Second course was a Scampi Risotto…..very creamy and wonderful!!!
Third was pasta shells with mussels. The pasta was fresh (not dried) and was cooked to perfection.
Next came a huge platter of crustaceans, including large shrimp and small lobsters.
Fifth was a Sea Bass filet that had a wonderful spiciness to the skin.
Then came two courses of desserts….. Tiramisu first followed by a fruit dish on ice that contained watermelon, melon, kiwi, pineapple, plums, prickly pear cactus fruit, etc.
The final course was coffee and liqueurs….three of those, all served in ice cold bottles. There was Limon cello, Grappa and an unknown liquid, possibly made from Eucalyptus fruit. We tried TINY sips of each….they burned ALL the way down!!
As we were leaving, I came face to face with one of the waiters who was well under 5 feet tall. He looked up at me, raised his hand toward the ceiling and laughed!!
They also came running out and told us that the ladies had all forgotten our roses so we each walked away with a beautiful rose.
Claudio asked where we were staying and said that he would drive us to that area so we wouldn’t have to take the metro. He got as close as he could go because of the one-way streets and dropped us off in a beautiful square. As we stepped out of the car, Michael looked at me and said “do you have ANY idea where we are?” I said no and that I also didn’t have a map so we were going to have to figure it out for ourselves. We stood there and looked at the statues and waited until they had driven off and then started walking in the general direction that Claudio had indicated. Fortunately, I soon started recognizing things that I had seen on my walk so we were pretty sure that we were headed in the right direction. The bottom line here is that we had a wonderful, romantic walk thru the streets of Rome!!!