It was in Signora Francesca’s high-ceilinged kitchen that I first learned to cook “in Italian”. I had come to Rome, after a year of touring Germany, to play a part in the Audrey Hepburn film Roman Holiday, All that long, somnolent summer, while waiting for the film to progress to where I was expected to take part, I spent the hot afternoons on the beaches of Rome’s Lido ... and my evenings in the little trattorie and bottiglieri around the Pantheon, the quarter of Rome I liked to call my own. Little by little my savings from the German Tour were exhausted, so I decided to move into an inexpensive pensione frequented by actor and dancer friends on the Via del Pantheon.
