Hot, dripping strips of slime. Ah! And the smell! Without a second thought you’d snarf down a link of processed meat product in Midtown, yet, somehow, this elicits hesitation.
This is the Florentine lampredotto sandwich, served from a cart on Via Dei Macci in a neighborhood devoid of tourists on the east end of town. On a beautifully ordinary Thursday morning, Florentines leisurely go about the day’s business on the street where Sergio Pollini has set up shop. As you learn that lampredotto is made with the fourth stomach of the cow, your own becomes a bit unsettled. What’s more, much to your alarm, it is revealed that some of that same bovine’s reproductive organs have curiously made their way into today’s batch.
Sergio is eager to offer you his succulent selection. There is a large pot a-boilin’ from which he extracts the finest innards. These he proceeds to chop mercilessly, a most merciful act as far as your queasy stomach is concerned. Onto a crusty roll goes the minced mess, bestrewn with salt, salsa verde, and hot chili oil. The top of the roll takes a quick bagno in the brodo and suddenly in your hand you’ve got Florence between two pieces of bread.
It wants you to eat it. Uno, due, tre…and…down she goes! Salty, spicy, slippery, the strips of stomach slink their way down your esophagus. Swallow. Perhaps a brief wave of nausea…but the flavor! It beckons another bite. (Admittedly, a swig of some libation, cold and strong, would have been ideal to wash it all down. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere, no?) The entirety of the stomach now in your own, you glance up to see a sly look of satisfaction and pride sneak up Sergio’s face.
Herein is your first taste, your first glimpse of the City of Lilies, a city that’s practical, rough around the edges, an acquired taste that you’ve acquired with a few bites. Will every experience in and of this new place be so terrible and so splendid? Perhaps, but you can’t say with certainty. What you do know is that you have found place: real people, real tradition, real food, real life on a real street corner. It is oddity. It is a thing divine. Perhaps a Deo gratias! wells up inside. This is the common man’s Florence, in a sense, the only real Florence.
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