Until I left Fiumicino airport, I did not believe I was going to make it to Rome. I can’t recall setting off on a trip before and fully expecting it to fail. So many friends this past month have had trips cancelled by a last-minute Covid test, or a change in travel restrictions. I printed off what seemed like dozens of QR codes, in some vague hope that that might make them a bit more powerful, a bit more ‘real.’
After all my over-preparation, I’m here now, and have settled into my room in the British School at Rome. The BSR has occupied this site since 1916, and you can tell; its student room has the unmistakable air of a British university dorm from the turn of the century, complete with a chunky old radiator and a little sink in the corner. It feels odd, in a good way, to be back in an academic environment after so long researching in the ether.
Even here, though, I can only read for so long. When the sun came out on Thursday, I did what I had been putting off since I arrived, and went for a little jog. I made a beeline for the Lungotevere, the car-free path along the river, as soon as I could. It’s not the most direct route to my finish line, but it’s more enjoyable to run without dodging walkers, cars and trams.
My run was really a pilgrimage that bypasses the Vatican, ending at Pizzarium, in Rome’s north-western Trionfale district. It is too far for a quick walk from the BSR, but not long enough to merit taking public transport. Thursday was Epiphany, a public holiday, but it didn’t stop queues from forming outside this rightly famous pizza-by-the-slice place.
Pizzarium is the brainchild of Gabriele Bonci, who needs little introduction for lovers of things-on-bread in Italy and parts of the USA, but has perhaps a little less name-recognition in London, where chewy Neapolitan-inspired pies abound (with a few notable exceptions, like ASAP Pizza).
Last year, when Mike’s in Peckham announced it would make pizza by the slice ‘inspired by Gabriele Bonci,’ this was quickly shortened, by at least one corner-cutting food publication, to ‘pizza by Gabriele Bonci’ — testament, I half-remember Jonathan Nunn suggesting, to how few people, even in London’s restaurant press, knew who he was. If he really was involved, you wouldn’t have been able to miss his cheeky, joyous logo.
In the pandemic, this tiny pizzeria appears even more crowded than it already was, but it works in much the same way as it always has. The only difference is that now, instead of waiting cheek by jowl inside, the hungry congregate outside.
You still take a numeretto, a numbered paper ticket, like you would at an Italian post office, or at a sliced meat counter at a British supermarket (do they still have tickets?). You wait for your turn, you order your slice, which is weighed, then re-heated. You then wait for your number to be called again — hearing other people’s numbers being repeated can make the queue feel even longer — and collect the pizza you came all this way for.
Why bother running to Pizzarium, though, when every Roman neighbourhood has a number of options for pizza al taglio, or pizza-by-the-slice? It’s neither the cheapest, nor the most convenient, in the sense that most neighbourhood pizza places have no queue, or hardly any. Sometimes, listening out for the numbers to climb gradually — so gradually! — towards mine, I have thought the same shameful thoughts. The first bite into that inimitable dough, however, reminds you just how special Pizzarium is.
Some credit Pizzarium’s Gabriele Bonci with ‘elevating’ Rome’s quintessential Cheap Eat, but I don’t like to think of it like that. It implies that the pizza al taglio that was there before, and shows little sign of going away, is somehow deficient.
This could not be further from the truth. the very cheapest pizza al taglio is often the one that hits the spot. It’s been there for me on lunch breaks, when my student loan still hadn’t arrived: a time when ‘treating myself’ meant a pezzetto — a tiny slice (no, a bit smaller!) — of margherita, and a baby Peroni, for less than a fiver. It’s been there for me late at night, coming home from a bar, when all I craved was an aluminium box of cold roast potatoes. I would defend it with all my being.
Though Gabriele Bonci is evidently working within the Roman tradition, I don’t think that by insisting on the highest quality toppings; by using heirloom, stone-ground wheat; or by being fanatical about the granular details of baking, he is trying to usurp or replace the neighbourhood pizza al taglio. Instead, I like to think of Pizzarium as stretching or extending the spectrum of Roman pizza. Pizzarium quite obviously cites the cheap neighbourhood pizza al taglio, but to my mind it supplements and enriches that tradition, rather than talking it down.
And what a tradition it is. The absence of codified rules stands in marked contrast — some might say refreshing contrast — to Neapolitan pizza, which is carefully policed for any deviations from the prescribed recipe. Aside from that, the crunch of the dough, heretical in some traditions, is prized here. And sometimes, perhaps most of the time, that’s exactly what I want.
Pizzarium’s toppings are unbeatable, to my knowledge, and have never disappointed. It’s hard to make a slice that, although stacked with juicy vegetables and molten cheese — for many of these pizzas are truly stacked — retains its integrity, and even its bite. There is a magic to it, or perhaps a science, I don’t know the difference. There’s a reason Pizzarium draws a crowd, even with fewer tourists than I have ever seen wandering around Rome, and even on Epiphany.