Sicily Journal V: Gelato

Photo: Hallie Cohen

Only in Rome can you get out of the Metro at Piazza Dante and be told to take a right on Machivelli (by the way the subway stop is Vittorio Emanuele). You might then go to Via Petrarca 3 and eat at Trattoria da Danilo. Take another right out of the restaurant and then take your third right and you will come to a half block long store front on Via Principe Eugenio with Palazzo del Freddo inscribed at the top and then Gelateria Giovanni Fassi, under which is Roma, Seoul, Shanghai, and above in English “1880, the oldest Italian Gelato factory.” The Sicilian Procopio die Coltelli was reputedly one of the first purveyors of this manna for ice cream lovers , but Fassi's expansion is truly globalization for a gelateria that was started in l907! You get two scoops with panna, the Italian whipped cream for 3 Euros, which is cheap by Italian gelato standards. Walking back to Dante to get the Metro, you pass stops named Flaminia, Lepanto and Ottavian. The Rome Metro is a fairly new invention, but those stops have could have easily been the names of characters in some Shakespeare play, say you took a right or left at Seneca before reaching Dante and Machiavelli