"rome" news and stories

Mario Batali will cook for you and 11 of your closest friends, if you are the highest bidder at a charity auction in Michigan next month. The "Sunday afternoon lunch in the true style of Rome", to be held on August 27th, includes a cooking lesson with as much participation as you want to have in preparing the food, wine tasting and (of course) a 10-course lunch. He auctioned a similar lunch for the group, The Conservancy, last year, which sold for $25,000. Batali says that he offers 6 to 10 such functions for charitable events every year and that most of them sell for around $50,000.

The silent auction closes on August 1st and bids can be placed online. The bidding starts at $5,000.

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For those of you swooning over Nicole's recent post about kitchen bling, maybe you can do a bit of penance here with this Pope John Paul II bottle opener ... a.k.a. "The Popener."

When my old roommate came back from a bit of work in Rome, she brought me a John Paul II bottle opener, straight from the Vatican. At the time, I was not happy. What kind of girlfriend brings a bottle opener back from Italy?

While I would have preferred something I could wear or eat or sell at a vast profit on eBay, I came to love this bottle opener with time. Every Sierra Nevada I cracked after a long day at the office became holy. Every Brooklyn Brown Ale became the equivalent of 20 "Hail Marys."

If you want one, you had better get cracking. While they're currently on sale at romegiftshop.com for $14.99 (free St. Peter postcard included!), can a Pope Benedict XVI bottle opener be that far off?

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MSN has posted a list of the top 10 cities for foodies, as determined by a travel site. The cities chosen are all over the globe, picked for a combination of unique dishes, celebrity chefs and all-around good cuisine. Barcelona, Brussels, Lyon and Rome were lauded for their long standing traditions, while Las Vegas and New York were included for having just about everything. While San Francisco did get a nod for its non-Asian cuisine, it seems to have been selected mainly on the availability of good Chinese food. Asian flavors are what put Tokyo, Vancouver and Hanoi on the list, too.

It appears that the definition of a foodie as someone who is willing (and possibly desperate) to eat anything has been put into play with this list, as along with Asian flair, Hanoi was picked for "unusual delicacies like dog or snake," including "fried snake skin, snake spring rolls, snake soup, and minced snake dumpling." Weird meats are all well and good, but to plan a whole trip around them seems a bit extreme.

Nevertheless, their list includes:

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