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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Job Description: Pasta roller in window


I'm trying to decide how I feel about this woman (the one in white) who rolls pasta for hours and hours each evening, in the window of Osteria da Fortunata, just off Campo de' Fiori in central Rome.  
Here's what one Yelp review says: There is a little 4 foot tall Italian woman sitting in an archway right in the middle of all of the customers making pasta.  She just sits there with a big smile on her face, day and night, and makes all of the pasta fresh that they use in their dishes. How cool is that!?!?!?!  She seems to love to watch everyone in the restaurant enjoying her pasta.  On my way to the restroom, I saw that there was a doorway to the kitchen slightly ajar, so I peeked in and snapped a picture of the pasta maker needing the dough.  Every now and then, the little woman would hobble back there and grab more dough, take it to her table and hand make the pasta that went into the dishes.  It doesn't get any fresher than that!

Hmmm.  Seems like heavy labor to me.  The woman helping her in the photo above also seemed to be the boss, and was coming and grabbing lots of pasta from her.  It seemed she had trouble keeping up with the demand, which was unceasing.  She IS a smiler.  And, below at end of post, she seems fine with being in tourist photos.  I still feel like she's being overworked and displayed in a way that makes me feel a lack of respect by the osteria's owners.  Enough that I slipped her a reasonably large (for Rome) tip; she smiled at that.
Osteria da Fortunata does get very good reviews, on both Yelp.com and Yelp.it.  We found it a good Italian trattoria - not better, not worse.

Via del Pellegrino 11
06 60667391

Dianne




1 comment:

Michael W said...

Hi Dianne, I just had a look at the Osteria da Fortunata on Google street and sure enough, the lady is there making pasta! The image was taken last October. It also shows a restaurant customer taking a picture of the Google car - or bike.