The Eternal Table

The Eternal Table: A Cultural History of Food in Rome is the first concise history of the food, gastronomy, and cuisine of Rome spanning from pre-Roman to modern times. It is a social history of the Eternal City seen through the lens of eating and feeding, as it advanced over the centuries in a city that fascinates like no other. The history of food in Rome unfolds as an engaging and enlightening narrative, recounting the human partnership with what was raised, picked, fished, caught, slaughtered, cooked, and served, as it was experienced and perceived along the continuum between excess and dearth by Romans and the many who passed through. Like the city itself, Rome’s culinary history is multi-layered, both vertically and horizontally, from migrant shepherds to the senatorial aristocracy, from the papal court to the flow of pilgrims and Grand Tourists, from the House of Savoy and the Kingdom of Italy to Fascism and the rise of the middle classes. The Eternal Table takes the reader on a culinary journey through the city streets, country kitchens, banquets, markets, festivals, osterias, and restaurants illuminating yet another facet of one of the most intriguing cities in the world.

Ever since King Solomon built the Holy Temple on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, Jews around the world have seen the holy city as the core of their lives. Jews from every continent on the globe have always prayed three times a day facing Jerusalem. Jews from Yemen, Ethiopia, and Lithuania; Jews from Morocco, Spain, India, Poland, and Russia.

This book discusses the reality of human being by pointing out some of the very fundamental issues that remain hidden from the eyes of the modern and post-modern western thought. By elaborating Mulla Sadra’s concept of Soul’s origination from the body and its survival through the Spirit, this book explains how the human soul develops stage by stage in a gradual manner from a vegetative body in the womb. By using Mulla Sadra’s principles of causality, this book shows how God and his Angels create man and other species on the Earth without denying Darwin’s evolutionary theory. In this reference, the role of metaphysical worlds in actualizing human knowledge is also discussed. This book also shows how the human life is a journey back towards its origin i.e. towards God and how this journey would continue even after death. In this reference, this book also explains the principles on the basis of which human soul would continue its life in the post-humus world. This book also clarifies the benefits of focusing onto the self and how this focus may lead to the realization of the Eternal Self of God. In this way, it shows how it is not impossible to experience the post-humus conditions even before death. It also specifies what kind of lifestyle may possibly ensure the occurrence of such mystic experiences.

Italy is experiencing a surge of gastronomic nostalgia, a yearning to recreate and relive the delectable rustic meals of yesteryear, of brimming chalices of wine and sauce-laden pasta. A return to the simple abundance of Italy's past! Ah, if only it were true. If there was a glorious yesteryear of Italian feasting, it was enjoyed only by society's elite. As for standard, rustic fare, such meals bore little resemblance to what is now considered-even in Italy-traditional Italian food. Determined to uncover the true roots of Italian cuisine and reveal its intriguing yet uncelebrated past, food historian Karima Moyer-Nocchi interviewed Italian "ninetysomething" women from various walks of life, from charcoal-makers to countesses. Her travels spanned from the far north to the deep south, as well as Italy's former landholdings. All of the interviewees had lived through the harrowing years called the Ventennio fascista, the twenty-year reign of fascism in Italy, and were eager to have their final say. What follows are eighteen remarkable oral narratives, each building upon the last to create a mosaic of Italian foodways, from the fascist era through to the post World War II boom, the "Dolce Vita." Each woman contributes a recipe chosen specifically to reflect what food was like when she was growing up under Mussolini. The narratives are separated by astringent, yet entertaining essay briefs, illuminating various aspects of gastronomic history and daily life in fascist Italy. Engrossingly entertaining, "Chewing the Fat" gently debunks the myths of Italy's gastronomic nostalgia industry, revealing a culture of food that is surprisingly different from the image most people have of Italian cuisine. "A remarkable insight into the realities of Italian food. This book lays bare the multiple dimensions of Italian gastronomy: geography, politics, social background, education and economics. It is an eloquent dissection of the nuances of the world's favorite cooking as well as a magical exercise in memory. A brilliant reconstruction of the kitchens and cookery (and much else besides) of a previous generation." -Tom Jaine, Food writer, publisher, critic, and restaurateur

The present book is the completion of author's prior research, Big-Bang or the Glue-Bond of spaces, Anti-spaces, and is showing: how and why Glue-Bond creates the circular motion, how Glue-Bond of Opposites creates different Kinetic energy and velocities on elements and so becomes the clashing, and the Head-on elastic collision, for projectile and Satellite.

In 1420, after more than one hundred years of the Avignon Exile and the Western Schism, the papal court returned to Rome, which had become depopulated, dangerous, and impoverished in the papacy's absence. Reviving the Eternal City examines the culture of Rome and the papal court during the first half of the fifteenth century. As Elizabeth McCahill explains, during these decades Rome and the Curia were caught between conflicting realities--between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between conciliarism and papalism, between an image of Rome as a restored republic and a dream of the city as a papal capital. Through the testimony of humanists' rhetorical texts and surviving archival materials, McCahill reconstructs the niche that scholars carved for themselves as they penned vivid descriptions of Rome and offered remedies for contemporary social, economic, religious, and political problems. In addition to analyzing the humanists' intellectual and professional program, McCahill investigates the different agendas that popes Martin V (1417-1431) and Eugenius IV (1431-1447) and their cardinals had for the post-Schism pontificate. Reviving the Eternal City illuminates an urban environment in transition and explores the ways in which curialists collaborated and competed to develop Rome's ancient legacy into a potent cultural myth.

“Meet the future of African literature” (Mukoma Wa Ngugi, author of Nairobi Heat) with this “gorgeous, wildly funny, and, above all, profoundly moving and humane” (Peter Orner, author of Am I Alone Here) coming-of-age tale following a young man who is forced to flee his homeland of Rwanda and make sense of his reality. Nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, not even the people in it. The most one can do is make some sort of start and then work toward some kind of ending. One might as well start with Séraphin: playlist-maker, nerd-jock hybrid, self-appointed merchant of cool, Rwandan, stifled and living in Namibia. Soon he will leave the confines of his family life for the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town, where loyal friends, hormone-saturated parties, adventurous conquests, and race controversies await. More than that, his long-awaited final year in law school promises to deliver a crucial puzzle piece of the Great Plan immigrant: a degree from a prestigious university. But a year is more than the sum of its parts, and en route to the future, the present must be lived through and even the past must be survived in this “hilarious and heartbreaking” (Adam Smyer, author of Knucklehead) intersection of pre- and post-1994 Rwanda, colonial and post-independence Windhoek, Paris and Brussels in the 70s, Nairobi public schools, and the racially charged streets of Cape Town. “Visually striking and beautiful told with youthful energy and hard-won wisdom” (Rabeah Ghaffari, author of To Keep the Sun Alive), The Eternal Audience of One is a lyrical and piquant tale of family, migration, friendship, war, identity, and race that will sweep you off your feet.