Lockdown Pasquetta

Pasquetta is my favorite holiday of the year, and this is because I was born, grew up in and have lived most of my life in Italy.

And while I am in my 50s, my childhood memories are so fresh and intense that I can reach around, touch and then pick them as you might a bouquet of springtime wild flowers.

When I was little, I could not wait for the the excitement of Easter, especially for Easter baskets on our Rome terrace (“cold-colder-warm-warmer-warmest : you found it !”) …

and eating myself silly on dove shaped sweet Easter colomba.

But even better was the next day : Pasquetta !

Pasquetta was the first three syllable word I spoke, my mother said, because my favorite early childhood song was one I learned from an old 45 RPM record she and my father often played on our gramophone called “I Santi del Mio Paese”. This featured traditional village ballads and songs performed without accompaniment by unskilled elderly singers in the Abruzzi, Sardegna and Veneto. My favorite was from the Abruzzi, the lyrical “E’ Domani La Pasquetta“. The first stanza goes like this :

E’ domani è la Pasquetta
sia santa e benedetta
con gran festa in allegria
buona Pasqua e Befania
con gran festa in allegria
buona Pasqua e Befania

Tomorrow is Pasquetta

Be it sainted and blessed

With a great party and joy

Happy Easter and Epiphany

With a great party and joy

Happy Easter and Epiphany

Pasquetta and a great party and joy were from my earliest childhood thus irresistibly connected. This was reinforced by the family tradition (the Roman tradition) of taking a huge picnic outside of the city (“fuori porta“, outside of the gates) to a field of wild daisies or dandelions, always within sight of ruins (for example an aqueduct or an Etruscan tomb).

And then devour many delicious foods to always include primo sale (the 30 day old sheep’s milk cheese that will with aging become pecorino), what was left of Easter day’s artichoke tart (my mother’s predictable masterpiece) and raw fava beans (without which, by tradition, Pasquetta picnics are failures). Eating raw fava is fun, especially if you are a child : releasing them from their soft, furry interior pod interiors after tearing into the wonderfully long pods.

And then for me, foil-wrapped Easter egg after Easter egg until I was quite giddy… and like my parents, who were snoozing after a liter of Frascati (brought in the dented old family Thermos), fell back onto the plaid picnic cloth. But I did not nap, watching instead the play of clouds across the blue Roman sky, or following with my eyes the pollen that drifted from nearby trees, or with that keen gaze of child, catching in my sight a bird, or a butterfly, or a bee, and then making up a story about it.

With a great party and joy ! It is no wonder that now, as then, the mere mention of Pasquetta makes me shiver with happiness.

Today in Rome it is day 35 of lockdown, and there are no Pasquetta picnics outside of the city walls. I read a story this morning about an unruly family that, fed up and determined to do what they wanted, tried to escape from their quarantined city with their picnic but were caught at 6:15 AM, fined 360 Euro and escorted home, which must have been quite embarrassing.

I comfort myself with memories and pictures from years past of Pasquetta picnics and with some of the foods I have always most loved during Roman Easter.