The Sunday Polenta in Rome: Nonna's Wooden Board on Via Merulana

The Poplar Board on Via Merulana

In the Esquilino district of Rome, my grandmother Teresa lived in a fourth-floor apartment with high ceilings and terrazzo floors. Every Sunday at 1:00 PM, sixteen of us squeezed around her rectangular walnut table: aunts, uncles, bickering in-laws, and hyperactive cousins.

Nonna didn't serve polenta on porcelain. That was for fancy restaurants. In her household, she used an heirloom board of poplar wood that had been hand-planed by her father in Abruzzo in 1935.

With two hands wrapped in kitchen towels, she would pour the molten, steaming yellow polenta directly onto the bare wood. Then came the red ragù—rich with pork ribs, sausage, and bay leaves—spread across the cornmeal like a battlefield map, topped with a blizzard of grated Pecorino Romano.

Eating Toward the Middle

The rule of the table was simple: you took your fork and ate your section of polenta, working your way from the perimeter toward the center where the tender pork ribs rested. As our forks moved closer together, the arguments about politics, football, and money dissolved into collective laughter.

Nonna never sat until everyone had eaten their fill. She stood by the marble sideboard in her calico apron, wiping sweat from her brow with the hem, watching her progeny feed. In that small Roman kitchen, hunger was banished, loneliness was outlawed, and family was an iron fortress.

The Fractured Table

Nonna passed away on a cold February morning in 2020, right before the pandemic locked down Rome. Without her gravity, the family collapsed into petty jealousies, inheritance disputes over the apartment, and radio silence.

Last Christmas, I retrieved the poplar board from the storage basement. The wood still carries faint knife marks from 1988 and the deep golden patina of olive oil and tomato sauce. I cooked polenta for my own young children.

We think families stay together through genetic obligation. They don't. They stay together because one stubborn matriarch refused to let the fire go out. Tonight on Solas Haven, the table on Via Merulana is set for eternity. Grazie, Nonna Teresa.