CURRENTLY billeted at Jolly Hotel Leonardo da Vinci right across the Vatican (hotels in Rome) and the setting of Mission Impossible: III, I’m planning not to eat here but to savor all the Italian dishes that I can find across Rome. I only eat breakfast here at the hotel which is not really exciting for me because it is just like a typical American breakfast – buns, coffee and all that. There’s no excitement in that.

And so I walked across streets intending to savor all the street food that I could find the whole day. This must be a great vacation alone because I really had a jolly good time strolling the city thoroughfares. I wanted to taste something different, something foreign from my hometown in Jersey City. I wanted to taste real authentic Italian food.

The most common thought that would snap to one’s mind is pizza. Anywhere in the world – whether you’re in Asia, pizza is really associated as being Italian. Of course, I didn’t want to eat pizza in some Pizza Hut, I wanted it to be really Italian. So I headed to Pizzera Il Maratoneta in Via dei Volsci corner Via del Sardi at the San Lorenzo area. Lots of students and families dine here and for the first time that day, I saw a real Italian family up close as well as three college girls who shyly took a look at me and wondered why I was alone. Although we all sport Caucasian features, locals here tend to distinguish tourists from themselves.

I don’t know how they can detect, maybe it’s in my demeanor. Maybe I’m cocky. Other countries in the world conclude that Americans are cocky by nature. I can’t agree or disagree on that. Others also say that Italians tend to be polite persons. That I can agree since I got a couple of Italian-American friends and they are really a courteous bunch. That is one of the reasons why I was influenced to choose Italy as my vacation place. In Pizzeria Il Maratoneta, the pizza is divided into three menus – menu light, menu atletica and menu deluxe. From my minute point of view about anything Italian, I deduced that menu atletica is for heavily-built people and menu deluxe is something more expensive. Weighing only 130 pounds, I settle for the first one, the menu light, because I want to eat more Italian food after finishing here. And I did not regret it. I soon found out that menu light costs only 8 euros, menu atletica costs 10 euros and menu deluxe costs 15 euros. Menu light is composed only of bruschetta ogni sapore, pizza a piacere and birra alla spina piccola. Menu atletica includes the famous pizza margherita (I would later order that on the second day of my visit here) and menu deluxe includes dolce.

And so, I definitely went back to the place on the second day of visit here and could not help myself but order menu atletica since I was curious on how pizza margherita tastes like. It really tastes yummy. The only difference is that the pizza was mixed with Parmigiano-Reggiano.