Trastevere at Sunset: Forty Years of Supplì, Then Dinner

The evening is built as a progression, from standing up to sitting down, which is how Romans actually eat their way through a night. It opens with a glass of wine or prosecco and a board of regional cured meats and cheeses, taken on your feet. Then a family-run friggitoria that has been making supplì for forty years, which in a trade where the oil and the timing are everything is the only qualification that counts. Then a stop for an Aperol spritz at a bar the neighbourhood uses. A supplì is a ball of rice cooked in ragù with a piece of mozzarella buried at the centre, breadcrumbed and fried. Romans call the good ones supplì al telefono, because when you pull one in half the cheese draws out into a long thread like an old telephone cord. If it does not do that, the cheese went in cold. After that a wine bar, and three kinds of bruschetta matched to a red and a white, at the point in the evening when the light goes and the tables outside fill up. The word comes from bruscare, to char over coals, which is the step that separates bruschetta from a piece of toast. The last stop is a proper trattoria for pasta served family style, with more wine, and gelato afterwards. That is five stops across Trastevere, ending with a plate in front of you rather than a paper cone in your hand. Three and a half hours over five stops works out at around forty minutes in each place once the walking is taken off, so this is the evening rather than something you fit into it. There is no point booking dinner afterwards. Six drinks are included across that time; pace them, and eat the fried things as they arrive instead of saving room. The group forms in Piazza di San Cosimato, Trastevere's market square, at the quiet south-western end of the district rather than in the crush around Santa Maria. There is no hotel pick-up, so you make your own way; tram 8 crosses the river from Largo Argentina and stops a few minutes' walk off. Two honest notes. The score is perfect but it rests on a handful of reviews, so read it as a small sample and not as a verdict. And the wine and the pairings are the structure of the evening rather than an extra, which makes it poor value for anyone not drinking. Trastevere means trans Tiberim, across the Tiber. It sat outside the city proper for most of Roman history, a district of dockers, tanners and foreigners, and it was never planned, which is why the streets still run the way they do and why an evening here is mostly spent in lanes too narrow for a car.