My blog

My youngest daughter and I took an evening flight to the capital of culinary paradise. We arrived late at our apartment in Prati, a stone's throw from the Vatican, but the restaurants around were still open. According to Maja, even sugar tastes better here.

Since the thermometers here show thirty-eight degrees, and it is difficult to spend the evenings here otherwise than eating and drinking, the only time of the day that can be devoted to running is the morning.
So I set the alarm for seven, and before eight I climbed one of the hills surrounding Rome, admiring the wonderful architecture of the Vatican suburbs along the way.
Every inch of this city has been designed with an Italian character, whether it was built in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the interwar period, or just a few years ago.

From the hill of Monte Mario, a wonderful view of the eternal city unfolded. I took a short break to gaze at the views, hearing only my own rapid breathing and the sounds of the cicadas. Apart from two retirees holding hands, there was not a living soul in the city park at the top of the hill. It was romantic. The only thing missing was a woman by my side. I had left mine in the apartment.

We ate breakfast as part of our booking reservation using a voucher, in a pub opposite the exit from our apartment. The Italian version of a continental breakfast, i.e. cornetto and cappuccino, is not exactly a good idea, so we stocked up on fruit, cookies and water before the upcoming battle with the heat.
My brave daughter, who not long ago would not have been persuaded to go for a walk around the house, today walked over twenty kilometers without the slightest resistance. My Google, thanks to my morning jog, in which Maja did not participate, showed that I had done 32 kilometers and burned 3,900 calories.
Where we didn't get to today: Piazza del Poppolo, the Leonardo da Vinci museum, the Villa Borghese gardens, the most beautiful - according to Sthendal - street in the world Via del Corso, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona, countless temples.

We ended the day in Trastevere, once a plebeian, now an avant-garde artists’ district, the centre of vibrant Roman life.

We found a place for dinner on YouTube. One of the first to pop up after typing "trastevere best food" was Osteria Zi Umberto, where we checked in right after it opened at 7:30 p.m. as the first guests. Unfortunately, all the tables outside were already booked, but as soon as we announced that we were holders of Covid passports, a table was found for us inside.
Maja took prosciutto e melone, spaghetti ala carbonara and panna cotta. Me flori di zucca frutti, tonnatrelli cacio e peppe, trippa ala romana, tiramisu, a carafe of house wine, espresso and jaegermeister.
We were given a glass of limoncello as a farewell. When I informed the waitress that my daughter would be fifteen in four days, she replied without hesitation in broken English: "She's on vacation."

We returned to our holiday home on scooters.

Today I am a Roman and I do not want to return to Poland for any price.

Today Maja and I got very close to God. It cost us a lot of effort, but in such matters it is not worth saving. The sweat wrung out on the five hundred and thirty-seven dizzying steps was absolutely worth the view that spread out on the top of the dome of the second largest Christian church in the world.

The vastness, grandeur and piety of the basilica are impressive. Unfortunately, the section with the tomb of JP2 in the catacombs was closed to visitors, so to compensate for this, under the papal balcony I showed Maja a YouTube video of the historical habemus papam from October 1978.

We spent the evening, and probably all the following ones, in Trastevere. This is where people eat, drink, meet, talk and declare love. This is where the heart of Rome beats.

Today we ate grilled octopus together, then rigatoni all amatriciana - Maja, spaghetti alle vongole veraci with a glass of white wine - me. And then we sat down on the busiest street in Trastevere, eating panna cotta and tiramisu, washed down with Aperol Spritz, gossiping about passers-by and counting the percentage of foreigners (it came out to less than 30 percent). Returning for the night, I couldn't resist a porchetta sandwich ordered from one of the exquisite prosciuterias.

I fell in love with Trastevere.

You have to really love your job to cover five hundred square meters of vaulting for five years, lying down, twenty meters above the ground, in stuffiness, darkness, and the stench of dyestuffs, and to do it in a way that people will later hail as a masterpiece.

The Pope's commission was quite cliché: show me man from creation to his fall and his loud cry for salvation. Michelangelo, however, put his whole self into his work, even showing with his brush his aversion to women and his unfulfilled love for his father.

I would be lying if I said my daughter took in today’s heavy dose of history in the Vatican museums with any great enthusiasm. But she managed to blurt out at the end of the nearly three-hour guided tour that she enjoyed it.

Walking among all these exhibits, created over the last three thousand years for the glory of God, the hierarchs and the church, gave me great pleasure today, despite the bitter reflection that came to me during the tour, that all these monumental works are the only things our church can boast about today. Because it cannot be tolerant, renouncing goods, caring for the poor or avoiding politics.

After this large dose of spiritual ecstasy, there was nothing left for us to do but indulge in mundane pleasures.

Like every evening, right after a shower, we headed for Trastevere, which is just a fifteen-minute leisurely stroll away. Today, however, we decided not to sit at the table during the day, but, as befits true Romans, to leave the house in search of food only after dark.
We had chosen the pub the previous evening, taking the length of the queue as our main criterion. And so, after the last twenty minutes - if we had wanted to sit outside, it would have taken at least twice as long - we found ourselves inside a pub called Nannarella.

The choice of the restaurant turned out to be a bullseye. To say that I had a culinary orgasm here today would be an understatement.

For starters, fried artichoke - crispy leaves and juicy, as if meaty interior. First course - tonnatrello carbonara with handmade, very yellow and very springy pasta, completely different from spaghetti, with a strong eggy taste with the addition of pancetta. For the second course, mussels in a completely non-garlic sauce, with the addition of herbs, butter and small tomatoes, and beef and pork meatballs with a taste that does not resemble our meatballs, juicy, sweet and fragrant, with well-seasoned kale and roasted potatoes.

There wasn't enough room for dessert today. We finished the evening with drinks. At the end Maja said rhetorically: since I've had enough alcohol on my trip, I guess it's time to try some herb. I pretended not to hear.

More cellulite and sagging bellies. Fewer long-legged blondes and sculpted male torsos. Darker sand and more dirt. This is more or less how the Roman beach in Ostia differs from our Baltic one. At least in this public version, because we were not allowed on the private one due to lack of space. The air temperature (35 degrees) and water (it took me 5 minutes to get used to it) are identical to those in Jastarnia.

After a swim and a poor meal with excellent coffee, we escaped from the beach to Castel Gandolfo. The Pope was not at his summer residence, but we had not come here for him, but to eat ice cream and enjoy the view of the charming Lago Albano.

However, the highlight of today was a visit to Tivoli, a medieval town some 30 kilometres from Rome.

The city, the size of Piaseczno, is situated on a mountainside, giving a good view of Lazio, and its centre looks as if it had been transported straight from the sixteenth century. There are few tourists here, so when walking around, you only come into contact with the occasional resident, who lives a normal life, hanging out their laundry and walking their animals. We were there after five in the afternoon. All the pubs were closed, but they looked as if they were waiting exclusively for the citizens of the city - they had no advertisements and you had to look closely to realise that there was a restaurant in the place you were passing. Cats were lazily lounging in the streets and in the shutters, ostentatiously ignoring passers-by. The smell of fried pancetta was constantly spreading.

I only saw small groups of tourists in Villa d"Este. It is a true masterpiece of architecture and probably the most beautiful place I have seen so far during my stay in Italy. They have gardens with fountains there. Unpretentious and full of magic.

We returned to Rome as dusk was falling and immediately headed for Trastevere. Maja took
pizza Margarita and fries, and I had pasta with shrimp and lamb with lots of wine. Then crema catalana, dessert of the day and Aperol. Divine.

On August 16, 2006, around 1 p.m., I received a short text message from my wife saying "Already."
I ran out of some important meeting and, stuck in traffic, headed towards the Infant Jesus Hospital on Starynkiewicza Street in Warsaw.

I ran to the first floor.

In the long corridor with countless doors, there wasn't a living soul in sight, and I had no idea which door handle to grab.

After a moment, one of the doors opened and a nurse appeared pushing a hospital bathtub on wheels with a small package in front of her.

She looked around and, seeing only me, she said in a voice that brooked no argument: - Mr. Biernat?
When I confirmed, she informed me, "This is your child." Then she turned on her heel and disappeared behind the closed door.

My knees buckled and tears began to flow from my eyes. But I had to pull myself together somehow, because this small, defenseless creature needed parental care.

Today, fifteen years after that touching moment, I sit with my eloquent and unwrapped girlfriend, with whom we recall our first meeting, enjoying a meat feast in the Roman Trastevere.