The Sauce, Not Just the Pasta: A Pesto and Fettuccine Class

Nearly every cooking class in Rome teaches you to make pasta and then hands you a sauce someone else made. This one is among the very few in the city that teaches the sauce as well. The sauce is pesto, and the choice is practical. Pesto is never cooked, so the whole thing happens at a table rather than at a stove, with no heat and no chance of anyone burning themselves. It is also the one classic Italian sauce you can reproduce in a rented kitchen anywhere, because it needs no equipment beyond something to crush with. The name comes from pestare, to pound, and the method is the point: worked in a mortar rather than cut by a blade, so the basil bruises instead of oxidising. It is Ligurian, not Roman, which is worth knowing before you order it in a trattoria here. Alongside it you make fettuccine, egg pasta rolled and cut by hand. The restaurant's own chef cooks it for you. Then it is served at your table with the appetisers and a drink, both included. The class runs in a private cooking lab inside a restaurant on Piazza Navona. Arrive ten minutes early and ask the staff to take you through. Latecomers and no-shows can only be rebooked for an extra fee, and refunds are not given.