commonplace book redux

In the Aeneid, Virgil puts forward a prophecy founded on proto-pizza consumption, which foretells where Rome shall be built. “When hunger shall drive you, landed on unknown shores, to eat the tables at your frugal meal,” Aeneas recalls his father telling him, “remember to place your first buildings there.” These “tables,” Aeneas later realizes, falling to his knees, are plates made of hard bread off which his band of Trojan refugees eat lunch. Two millennia later, Camillo (opened in September by the proprietors of the Clinton Hill standby Locanda Vini e Olii) honors pizza’s Virgilian origins—in the ultimate old-timey Brooklyn move—with pinsa, a Roman flatbread.

Carolyn Kormann, Camillo, Tables for two, New Yorker Magazime, November 27, 2017