T A B L E_T A L K Share advice for the solo female traveler in a Wanderlust conversation in Table Talk   How-to, why-not and what-for -- find it all at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y Hungarian rhapsody By Julie Jindal An encounter with an intimidating waiter is transformed by an unexpected feast (04/01/99) Honeymoon turbulence By Rosemary Berkeley For really getting to know someone, there's nothing like a 10-hour flight where everything that can go wrong, does (03/31/99) Going without at Ramadan By Emily Zuzik At the beginning of the Muslim fast, a traveler decides to do as the Marrakeshans do (03/30/99) Mediterranean reverie By Anne Dowie Nestled in the rugged mountains overlooking the Ligurian Sea, Cinque Terre is the source of endless scenic and culinary delights (03/28/99) Ring in the loser By Mark Schatzker What you do on New Year's Eve 1999 says more about your economic -- and social -- status than anything else (03/26/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		THE ROASTING OF THE LAMBS | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Good eating is as essential to happiness in Rome as, say, visiting the Forum or the Coliseum. The Romans eat late -- lunch at 1 or 2 p.m., dinner anywhere from 9 p.m. to midnight. Since my belly was telling me it was lunch time, though, I gazed out over the jumble of roofs and gardens and kept thinking of food. The whole crazy mess of the city looked like an edible millefoglie -- a delicious, creamy layered confection the French hijacked and called millefeuille. Rome's peculiar layer cake of civilization has been three millennia in the making. The wondrous thing about spring here is that the tired old Eternal City of the tourist brochures, a city built on the ruins of ruins and filled with the ghosts of countless other ages, can suddenly become young, fresh and virginal all over again. Spring rites here are timeless. Even the Vatican's religious festivities ride piggyback on history. Take, for example, the ancient celebration of the death and resurrection of Attis, a vegetation god, which coincided with the spring equinox. And the agriculture goddess Ceres was feted for a week during the Cerealia (the origin of our word for "cereal"), in mid-April. Add to Attis' vegetables and Ceres' pasta the yearly arrival of spring lamb -- sacrificed and eaten hereabouts since pre-Roman times -- and you have the makings of a venerable Easter meal that's still very much in vogue today. We strolled over to the Campo de' Fiori, Rome's oldest and most beautifully named outdoor marketplace -- literally, it means flower field or square for flower sellers. The Campo, too, seemed newborn with its bushels of peonies, roses and potted daisies. Truckloads of farm produce had come in from nearby fields that morning -- a kaleidoscope of baby lettuce, zucchini and strawberries, but especially artichokes. A legion of greengrocers had set up their folding chairs and were skinning the artichokes back to the heart, which is about the only part the Romans will eat. The grocers chatted and joked and whittled the artichokes the way their ancestors did. Set amid Rome's wealth of monuments, the Campo de' Fiori is all the more wonderful for its being such a humble square. There's no church on it, for example, which sets it apart from most Roman piazze. So while the Vatican caters to the spiritual needs of some, the Campo sees to the vital rituals of buying, preparing and eating food. At long last we found a table outside at a trattoria 100 yards or so from the Campo, tucked in a corner of the Piazza Farnese, a celebrated square with a beautiful palace on it. The trattoria, a family operation, was probably here in Emperor Nero's day, let alone when Palazzo Farnese was built a mere 400 years ago. It's called Osteria ar Galletto (109 Piazza Farnese; tel: 06-686-1714; closed Sunday; full meal without wine, about $25 per person), and though baked poultry is the house specialty (galletto means small rooster), we wanted lamb. Good thing: On the menu was spring lamb in a dozen different styles. When I asked the waiter how each dish was made, he began his mouth-watering recitation. Stuff or spike it with minced rosemary and garlic, he said, and roast it with new potatoes and that's called abbacchio al forno con patate, the centerpiece at Easter lunch or dinner. Braise the lamb in broth with white wine and scrambled egg yolks, and it's called abbacchio brodettato, an Easter Monday specialty. Cleave it into dainty chops, sprinkle them with rosemary and grill them, and you get abbacchio scottadito, so named because the chops burn your fingertips when you pick them up. If you sauté the lamb's internal organs, however, adding tender artichoke hearts, you get coratella con carciofi. That's a hearty dish you eat on Easter morning around 10 a.m. (if you've fasted on Saturday) or at lunch (if, like most Romans, you haven't fasted at all). The list went on. Tie the baby lamb's tiny intestines, still full of milk, into loops and sauté them slowly with tomatoes and you have pajata d'abbacchio, served with rigatoni or as a simple second course. Batter the poor beast's brains and deep-fry them, again with sliced artichokes, and you get cervelli fritti. Whole, oven-roasted lamb's head, split open, sprinkled with salt, pepper and rosemary, becomes testarelle d'abbacchio. Every part is used, confirmed the waiter; the lamb does not die in vain. We ordered the rigatoni pasta with tomatoes and pajata d'abbacchio sauce, and though the idea of eating intestines wasn't very appealing, the flavor was fabulous. Then we burned our fingertips on the tiny lamb chops and gobbled up a half-ton of artichoke hearts. The twin fountains in the Piazza Farnese splashed merrily away. The inevitable swarms of Vespas zipped down the pedestrian-only alley where we sat, scattering pigeons and tourists. The sun slanted down over the old stones. I wondered if my parents had ever brought me to this trattoria when we lived in Rome in the mid-1960s. It felt like an ideal place to be born and suckled. My wife interrupted my reveries by insisting we have a salad of the wild arugula we'd seen back at the Campo. The waiter approved, leaning over our table to tell us an old Roman saying: "To dress a salad right," he said, "you need four people: a wise man to put in the salt, a miser to add the vinegar, a wastrel to pour in the oil and a madman to mix and toss it." He covered all four roles. Though we were bursting at the seams, we still forced down a basketful of strawberries and dispatched several chocolate Easter eggs while sipping our double espressos. Heaven? Yes, and we hadn't been into a single church, let alone the Vatican. As we strolled around that afternoon digesting our meal we stopped to listen to the Bernini fountains in the arena-shaped Piazza Navona. We picked daisies in the Forum and trailed along the Tiber under plane trees that had just uncurled their tender leaves. By the time the sun had set behind the Castel Sant'Angelo -- that hulking circular fortress perched over the river -- I'd actually worked up an appetite again. It was either positively shameful or a sign of good health. By about 9 p.m. we were at table again, surrounded by neo-pagans delirious, like us, with virulent spring fever. "My advice is," said a Bacchus look-alike to his Caesar-clone of a pal, "when in Rome for Easter, do as the Romans do: Watch mass on TV, then make a gastronomic pilgrimage to your favorite trattoria." My wife and I raised a toast to our neighbor's wisdom. "Salute," I said. "The gods of old would approve." SALON | April 2, 1999 David Downie is Salon's Paris correspondent. His last story for Salon was "The Wizard of Oise."