Food Tours · Tour

From the Turtle Fountain to Cacio e Pepe by the Pantheon

Five stops, six guests, three hours, and a dinner assembled by walking rather than by sitting in one place. You meet at the Fontana delle Tartarughe on Piazza Mattei, a small late-Renaissance fountain whose four bronze turtles were added about seventy years after it was built, probably by Bernini, and which is the kind of thing you would walk past without noticing. The first stop is the aperitivo: cured meats, cheeses and wine at a place the operator chose rather than one that pays them. Then a tavern in the Ghetto, where four centuries of enclosure produced a kitchen unlike anywhere else in Italy. Walking to the third stop you pass Largo Argentina, where four Republican temples sit below the street and a cat colony has held the ruins since the 1920s. There you eat Roman pizza al taglio, cut by weight from long trays, several flavours with Italian beer. The last savoury course is cacio e pepe, eaten in Piazza della Rotonda in front of the Pantheon, whose concrete dome has stood unreinforced since 126 AD and is still the largest of its kind anywhere. The dish is pecorino, black pepper and pasta water, and it is the hardest simple thing in Roman cooking. Gelato closes it, in a small square near Piazza Navona. A five-course lunch or dinner with drinks throughout: prosecco, wine, beer. Group capped at six, with a private option. Smart casual. English-speaking guide. Minimum drinking age eighteen. Vegetarian and gluten-free can be handled if you say so in the booking notes.