Buy the Eggs, Then Make the Pasta: A Trastevere Class

The class starts at a shop rather than a kitchen, and that order is the point. The first stop is a Roman norcineria in Trastevere, where the guide buys the ingredients for the lesson in front of you: fresh eggs, grated Parmigiano, sheep's ricotta. While that happens you eat pizza bianca stuffed with porchetta and drink a glass of wine. Seeing what goes into the dough bought over a counter, from a shop that sells to the neighbourhood, changes how the next two hours read. Then an old-school trattoria for the hands-on part: fresh pasta from scratch, shaping your own fettuccine and ravioli, with the technical points explained as you go and corrected when your sheet is too thick. You then sit down and eat what you made. Pasta alla chitarra with amatriciana, and ravioli filled with the sheep's ricotta and lemon zest you watched being bought, dressed with butter and sage. With wine. The last stop is a gelateria for organic gelato, and the guide explains how to tell real gelato from the industrial version, which mostly comes down to colour and how high it is piled in the tub. The guide carries a purple Eating Europe bag.