The History First, Then You Sit Down and Eat

The order is the point. Other evenings mix the talking and the eating until you get neither properly. Here the history comes first, standing up, and dinner comes after, sitting down. The history is the part Rome does not put on the plaques: what people actually did, who poisoned whom, and how much of what everyone repeats about the emperors was invented afterwards by their enemies. Then the table. Bruschetta, made the way it should be, with bread grilled hard enough to scrape the garlic against. Fried courgette flowers. Italian pasta. Wine through the meal, and limoncello at the end, which is what an Italian dinner is closed with even though it comes from a different part of the country entirely. It runs in the evening. Meet in front of the Embassy of Brazil on Piazza Navona, which occupies the palace Innocent X built for his family on the square. Three hours, with dinner and what you drink already paid for, so this takes the place of the evening meal rather than filling the hour before one. The building you wait outside is worth the two minutes. Palazzo Pamphilj went up for Giovanni Battista Pamphilj in the years after he was elected Innocent X in 1644, and that family's rebuilding is most of the reason the square looks the way it does today. Brazil has used it as an embassy since 1920 and owns it now. The person widely held to have run that pontificate was the pope's widowed sister-in-law, Olimpia Maidalchini, who lived in the palace and whom Romans called the papess. She is a fair sample of the sort of history this evening deals in. The food is Roman rather than Italian in general, and the detail matters. Bruschetta takes its name from bruscare, to char: the bread has to come off the grill hard enough that a raw garlic clove crumbles as you drag it across the surface. Courgette flowers here are usually filled with mozzarella and anchovy before they go into batter, which is what makes a fried flower worth the trouble. Limoncello is lemon peel steeped in spirit and poured straight from the freezer, and it belongs to the coast below Naples rather than to Rome at all. The experience is marked wheelchair accessible, service animals are welcome and nothing about it asks for stamina. Twelve at a table, and the evening runs in English. Tips are left to you.