Alatri

This last Sunday I went on a study trip to a small mountain village about 1.5 hours north of Rome called Alatri. Every year, Alatri has a town festival. Several of the Rome Centers employees live in Alatri and they told our administrators about this festival. The main event is the Parmigiana cheese roll. A path is carved out from the top of a hill, all the way down into town, and all through town, this path is fenced off, and at the end of the festival, everyone gathers to watch a huge roll of parimigiana cheese get rolled down this hill. Earlier in the day, four teams of local men compete to see which team can launch the cheese roll farthest. Most of the people dress in traditional, very brightly colored clothing. All the meat and cheese shops put out trays of parmigiana cheese for passerbys to try. I never knew parmigiana cheese was so delicious alone. It seems to always get mixed in with dishes as an accent, but I tried several fresh chunks, all by themselves, and they were just out of this world.
The town of Alatri is beautiful to say the least. If you walk to any of it's surrounding borders, you get an incredible view of the mountains and valleys below and around Alatri. Alatri is quaint and quietly vibrant. The people are of the "salt of the earth" kind of folk, and extremely friendly and welcoming to the massive of heard of American students I arrived with. There are only about 600 people in the town, and very few tourists visit it, so they were thrilled to have us there.
It seems that every day I am here, I eat something or somethings so delicious that I don't know how I will ever be satisfied again with American food. For lunch we ate at a restaurant called La Rosetta. Lunch had five courses. The first, a plate of appetizers including bruschetta, roasted eggplant, a mini omelette, and warm goat cheese. Next, penne pasta in a light cream sauce with asparagus (this is a dish I MUST learn to duplicate). For the third plate, 2 perfectly cooked cannelloni con pomodoro stuffed with the most flavorful ground beef I've ever tasted. For the fourth plate, two veal cutlets covered in an artichoke spread with roasted potatoes, again, OUT OF THIS WORLD, and for desert, a cup of fresh fruit followed by espresso. And of course, all courses were accompanied by bottles of house white wine, perfectly in season and so refreshing on a hot day. I say with certainty that it was one of the best meals I've ever had in my life.
What made lunch most special of all was the fact that the mayor of Alatri came into the restaurant and thanked us all so much for coming, and presented us with a plaque which stated September 9th, the day of the festival, will also be a holiday in honor of the Rome Center Students. I decided that I am going to try and go to Rome annually, or at least as often as I can afford around the 9th of September every year so I can go back to Alatri for this holiday.
After lunch, my friend Stef and I sat in the little town square, among antiquated buildings and fresh mountain air, and I found myself desiring the simplicity and the natural beauty around me. I don't know if I could ever live in a place like Alatri permanently, but I know that I definitely would love to spend a lot more time in places like it. I decided that if (or when) I ever get around to writing a book, I would like to do so in a place like Alatri. I just think that Americans, with out fast paced, big-city mentality, have so much to learn from people and places like Alatri and its citizens. At Alatri, sitting in the main piazza, listening to the church bell toll, I experienced a moment of peace and clarity which was so profound, and the likes of which I rarely find these days.