So Limentani stayed hidden there and survived. She was told to leave because it was becoming too dangerous, but her host fell sick and became dependent on her. "Seventeen people – her brothers, her sister with her husband and their five children… everyone."ĭuring World War Two, her grandmother, Graziella Limentani, was hiding, pregnant and with a four-year-old daughter, in the house of a Catholic woman in the Roman neighbourhood of Primavalle. "They deported all of my grandmother's family," she said, referring to the Nazis during the Holocaust. "Maybe the chefs are not the most obsequious, and they have always worked in that same little shop, but they carry on a grand tradition of exceptional desserts."įor over 200 years, Boccione has been run by women, and it's much more than just a history of pastry. "Boccione is the symbol of confident and casual Roman Jewish pride: the beauty of being who you are and being respected for what you do," said my friend Karen Di Porto, a film director who grew up eating crostata in the main square. The online reviews of the shop are virtually unanimous: Romans and tourists alike love the tarts, though some are slightly intimidated by the ladies' hasty customer service.
Boccione's ochre walls are peeling and there is no shop sign above its two arched windows, but it is so popular that people line up well into the middle of the piazza to buy their pastries. The shop faces the main piazza of the Ghetto, once an insalubrious enclosed area where Jewish people were forced to live, and now an elegant neighbourhood in the heart of the city, between the Tiber River, the Pantheon and Campo de' Fiori. That pope thing has nothing to do with it," said Sandra Calò, one of the six women who run Pasticceria Boccione, the only Roman pastry shop where you can buy the original Crostata di ricotta e visciole. "It's absolutely not true! It's a cake that my grandmother invented about 65 or maybe 75 years ago. And its story has come to symbolise Jewish ingenuity and resilience in the face of centuries of oppression. As Bondì explained, they covered the normally open tart with a top layer of dough, so that no one could see the ricotta from the outside, and they could sell it without fear. That's when Jewish bakers supposedly came up with a Trojan horse strategy for their Crostata di ricotta e visciole. They were also banned from many business pursuits, including the selling of cheese. Silversmiths were not permitted to forge menorah, the nine-branched candelabra used for religious rituals Jewish men and women had to wear a piece of yellow cloth stitched to their hat similarly to when Jews were forced to wear the Star of David during World War Two they couldn't talk to Christians and they couldn't light the traditional torches used to honour their dead on the way from the synagogue to the cemetery during funerary rites. The Church believed that Christianity had to replace Hebraism, and they did all they could to make Jewish people's lives impossible. "It's just another item in a long list of humiliations," explained Vatican expert Iacopo Scaramuzzi. Ruben, whose recipe for the tart is featured in his new book, Cucina Con Ruben, believes that it was designed to bypass an absurd ban on selling cheese and dairy products imposed on Jews by the Vatican in the 18th Century as outlined in Chapter XXIV of Pope Pius VI's Edict Concerning the Jews (1775). But the case of the Crostata di ricotta e visciole goes one step further in ingenuity. The art of doing a lot with a little is at the heart of most Roman-Jewish recipes. "It is a stratagem, a work of trickery," said Ruben Bondì, a Roman Jewish chef, who became famous for his TikTok and Instagram videos in which he leans out of a balcony and asks his neighbours, "What do you want to eat?" He then prepares anything from salt cod roll sandwiches to zucchini risotto in a makeshift kitchen set up on top of an air-conditioning unit, often with the help of his little nephew, cousin or sister. The iconic Crostata di ricotta e visciole (ricotta and sour cherry tart) is the perfect example – with a creamy layer of sweet whey cheese, generous coating of jam and thick shortcrust concealing a secret.
In Rome, even something as proverbially simple as a "piece of cake" – or tart – can have hidden layers of history, resilience and even mischief tucked away between the crust and the cream.
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