She sits on a quiet corner up the street from the Coliseum, and when the weather is warm you can sit at an outside table, under the trees that line the sidewalk. If you’re really fortunate the wind might sway the branches and you may capture a glimpse of the edges of the grand marble structure in the distance.
This has become one of my favorite restaurants, but five years ago I thought she had closed forever. So many places didn’t survive the economic ravages of COVID, and for a time, everything I read led me to believe that we had lost Hostaria da Nerone along the way.
I don’t remember the full details of my first meal here, but the second time I knew it was a return visit. The wooden tables, yellowing curtains, and pale fluorescent lighting were all familiar. The multilingual menu, with indicators suggesting which Roman specialties to try, plucked at at the gossamer strings of hazy memories in my mind.
I’m fairly certain that first visit had been on the recommendation of a guidebook – probably Frommer’s (I found Fodor’s guidebooks to be too stuffy). When I first started traveling, I would purchase a book dedicated to a country and tear out the chapters I would need for the trip, traveling with small sheaves of paper tucked into corners of my luggage, rather than haul around a heavy tome that wouldn’t fit into my pocket when I was afoot for the day.
I ate my meal (it was probably saltimbocca di vitello) and then mostly forgot about the place.
Several years later, as I was scouring the internet for places to eat, I found reference to Hostaria da Nerone, describing it as an unassuming restaurant that still draws true Romans to its door. In particular, the author suggested that diners should try the spaghetti with clams.
Spaghetti alle vongole is a dish I learned to love when I visited my Sicilian cousins, not expecting to like it at all, But my family had ordered for me, so I ate it with a plan to make the best of it, as I’ve had mixed experience with shellfish. Making “the best of it” turned out to be extraordinary, as I was completely enraptured by the delicate spaghetti, sauced with butter, wine, and garlic, enrobing tiny briny clams that burst with flavor in my mouth..
“Making the best of it,” by the way, is also how I came to love espresso.
I later tried to find something similar at home in the States, but instead mostly found clams buried in overwhelming, heavy tomato sauce. A smattering of places try but just don’t get it right, and the search was marked by one very unfortunate meal featuring an excess of sand.
I gave up on the dish until that trip back to Italy, when I would return to Hostaria da Nerone.
Now I always get spaghetti alle vongole when I go to Hostaria da Nerone. And I almost exclusively get it at Hostaria da Nerone.
At some point in late 2020, I looked up Nerone, and found her listed as closed. I was saddened to hear this, as it’s a place I have made a point to visit when in Rome.
And yet, I persisted, and found rumors that she still stood. Reviews were posted, and iI hoped against hope. Was she still there, and was she the same?
Sometimes you can’t go home.
I tried to go there in March, but now she seems to be only open for lunch, and dinner isn’t an option. And still I fretted, as I had no firsthand evidence proving that she had truly survived.
So today I got up early in Bologna and hurried to a high-speed train that would get me to Rome in plenty of time for lunch. There would be plenty of time to meander through the streets of the Eternal City, climbing her steps and dodging her traffic.
But for this day, I truly had only one mission.
And finally, seated in the wood-paneled dining room, eating my spaghetti with clams, I found a little bit of the peace and comfort I had been needing after five years of worry.
And it was the best.
butterblogger 