’O Franza o Spagna purché se magna!‘ so proclaimed the disenchanted Roman plebs in the 16th century, faced with the clash for supremacy in Europe between Charles V of Habsburg and François I of Valois, but back then people were starving, there were famines, and combining lunch and dinner for many was a desperate task.
But what about now? In this age of abundance (in Rome and our ‘fortunate’ part of the world, of course, because elsewhere things are not like that) it might seem that eating and drinking must have lost their centrality, but this is not the case: just look at the myriad cooking programmes, chef competitions, and so on that crowd the television networks’ schedules, or the exaggerated advertisements for food and drink that occupy the walls of cities.
But it is not the healthy popular interest in gargantuan eating, for the pleasure of a full belly, if anything it is an intellectualistic and arty quest for novelty, strangeness, the unusual, closer to the banquet of a parvenu like Trimalchio than to Rabelais.
Perhaps then, if you go around the city, you will only find asphyxiated Nouvelle Cuisine Talibans or weird fashionistas who pass themselves off as refined connoisseurs of the pleasures of the table without understanding anything about it?
Perhaps not, it is also true that the plebs are no longer so at home in the centre of Rome, replaced by throngs of tourists squatting all over the place, but it is enough to look around with a glance supported by a little ironic love for the good old ‘magnà e beve’ to catch almost out of the corner of one’s eye men and women intent simply on eating and enjoying it.
