Credit: Ed Anderson

Katie Parla’s Love Letter to the Eternal City

10 Minute read

04 Nov 2025

Paul Feinstein

Journalist

Copy link

After two decades in Rome, the writer, historian, and guide delivers her magnum opus—a portrait of the city’s soul told through food, faith, and three thousand years of flavor.

Katie Parla has spent two decades documenting Rome through its food, first as a guide and journalist, then as a scholar and author. With Rome: A Culinary History, Cookbook, and Field Guide to the Flavors that Built a City, the New York Times–bestselling writer delivers what feels like the culmination of all those years: a sweeping, sensory, and deeply personal study of how Romans have lived, ruled, worshiped, and eaten across nearly three thousand years.

“I write out of just compulsion,” Parla says with a laugh. “My passion is really leading private food tours of the city, which are full immersions in urbanism, history, culture, and language, and we eat along the way.”

It’s a fitting origin story for a writer who bridges the gap between scholarship and appetite. “People kind of frame history and archaeology in Rome and food in Rome as being very distinct endeavors,” she says. “But I always see them as very connected.”

If Tasting Rome was a snapshot, “an accumulation of a decade’s worth of reporting on the city for The New York Times, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Saveur, and others,” then Rome is the deep dive. It is her second non-guidebook about the city and easily her most ambitious. “There’s ‘how to trattoria,’ ‘how to navigate a wine bar,’ ‘what should you be drinking,’” she explains. “I thought it was an interesting way, twenty years in, to unify all of those things together.”

This time, Parla doesn’t just write recipes. She builds an archive. The book opens with a history of Roman food stretching from ancient banquets to contemporary kitchens, tracing how power, faith, politics, urbanism, and migration have shaped everything that ends up on the city’s tables. Later chapters explore dishes both humble and iconic—fried snacks, soups, pastas, and offal—interspersed with essays on topics like the fetishization of cucina povera and the city’s growing pizza-oven industry in Pigneto. It all culminates in her signature #ParlaPicks guide to where and how to eat like a Roman today.

“I get a lot of reader feedback from my other books that, like, ‘I’ve never cooked a single recipe. I just like to read the feature,’” Parla says. “So I was like, why don’t I just make a third of the book about food history without any recipes.”

Her research reconnected her with the physical city. “Some of the locations of the actual food archaeology were fascinating,” she says. “Like the black pepper market under the giant basilica that I ride my bike past every day.” She also became captivated by how dishes evolved. “Cacio e pepe started as drunk food at the tavern that eventually got adopted into everybody’s more formal dining setting once the tavern was retired and the trattoria emerged.”

For Parla, history and appetite are inseparable. “Taken together, these small things are a portrait of Rome right now,” she says. “And in five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, this book is ripe for updates.” She imagines future editions or digital versions expanding as the city changes. “I don’t know what publishing and the consumption of the written word is going to look like in a decade,” she admits. “I hope that if it’s not like the ten-year anniversary edition or whatever, parts of the book can live on in other ways, like maybe as a digital guide or an app.”

In the book, Parla pays homage to Ada Boni, author of Il Talismano della Felicità, calling her a kindred spirit of sorts. “She comes of age in unification-era Rome,” Parla explains. “She’s publishing recipes and letters to the editor and talking about how food can be a vehicle for a kind of intellectual pursuit.” Boni’s work, she notes, shows how fluid even the most ‘traditional’ Roman dishes once were, a lineage Parla continues.

Asked what she hopes readers take away from Rome, Parla doesn’t hesitate. “That food can be a fun but academic pursuit,” she says. “We can think about it intellectually, not just as something grabbable or with TikTok potential.” Then she adds, smiling, “I basically just want to pressure people into eating things that make them uncomfortable.”

For Parla, that means embracing the full spectrum of Roman food, from bitter greens to tripe, tongue, and veal intestines. “If you're not eating the intestines of milk-fed veal in Rome tossed with rigatoni, you are not understanding the food culture,” she says.

As for where Roman cuisine goes next, Parla is realistic. “Unless the economy gets way better, more and more places will seek to have the atmosphere of a trattoria but are really more like wine bars or all-day cafés,” she says. “It’s not the most charming thing when a city has to evolve away from its classic dining genres, but I don’t think we can be precious about the economic realities.”

With Rome, Parla has written not just a cookbook, but a cultural biography—one that fuses academic rigor, lived experience, and love for a city that refuses to stand still. It is the culmination of twenty years of reporting, teaching, and eating, and perhaps the truest expression yet of her life’s work. If Tasting Rome taught readers how to eat like a Roman, Rome teaches them how to think like one.