The Monotony Of Rome (Means The Cultural Soup Is Thick)

ROME, Italy- People seem to go to Italy for the food — there’s a zillion restaurants to choose from in Rome … and they all look exactly the same …

… and they all serve the exact same things.

I’ve probably never seen such a monotonous culinary scene in all my travels. You have pizza, you have pasta, you have gelato … They’re served out of open front restaurants with white or red trimmed awnings. Over and over again, all the way down the street …

But this monotony is, paradoxically, what makes Rome unique.

In most places in the world it’s extremely difficult to truly sample local food short of storming into someone’s dining room. Almost all of the restaurants in tourist destinations now serve some misconceptualized variant of somewhere else: Chinese food, Greek food, Spanish food, Turkish food, Israeli food, American food, Italian food … (All of which should probably be put in the quotes of sarcasm.) Go to a place like Casco Viejo in Panama and you will find yourself in surrounded by restaurants but hardly a single one representing the culinary traditions of the place you’re standing in.

Wherever we go, we want the world, not the places we go to.

Granted, most traditional culinary options of the world do not suit the palate of the discerning foodie. The foodie wants something that tastes familiar and looks pretty so they can snap a photo and their IG followers can go yum, yum, yum (i.e. like, like, like). Like the conventional tourist, the foodie has next to zero interest in the places their passports claim they’ve been — they want to be satiated … they want to be entertained … they want to stuff their gullet and check off to-do to-eat lists … they do not want to be surprised, they do not want to be challenged, they do not want to be made to feel uncomfortable. They do not want to go to southern India and eat spicy slop. They do not want to go to Mongolia and eat a plate of smoked meat that’s been sitting out for three days. They do not want to eat the innards that the local people view as delicacies. They curl up their lips at curdled milk. They want global culture, not local. And there’s nothing wrong with this …

Rome has been a tourist destination for 2,000 years. It is what the place is. And this has made it resilient to this new wave globalized tourism. While Panama is doing Costa Rica while Costa Rica is doing Vietnam while Vietnam is doing Thailand while Thailand is doing India, Italy just does Italy. And it does it well.

But the monotony of Rome didn’t end at restaurants … and was something that I truly found remarkable about the place. The clothes that people wore, their hairstyles, their mannerisms were likewise the same, people were out in the streets doing the same things — same, same, same. During one brief stretch of walking down a busy bar street I counted five dudes wearing the exact same jacket. I don’t believe I saw a single attempt at individuality. I don’t recall anyone going out of their way to stand out. Coming from NYC — a place where everyone is bent on being their own little island of self-ness — being somewhere where the cultural soup was a little thicker was enough to satiate my discerning ethnographic palate.

I imagine that this is how all places were a hundred years ago. Places were distinct because so much about them were the same — they had identity. You’d go off to Shanghai or London or Baghdad and it would be completely distinct from all others places in the world, but within their respective liminal zones it would be same, same, same. Old photos attest to this. Everywhere was once the same as itself … now we live in a world where everywhere is becoming the same as everywhere … and places like Rome stand out.