The Rome that surprised Stanley Tucci. The first thing I want to know is the one everyone asks: “So, how did it go with Stanley Tucci?” Laughing and sitting beside the counter where everything began, Nicolò Trecastelli tells me, “He showed up one night at 10. Super casual, super chill. He sat right here and we started talking like we’d known each other forever. No distance, no formality.”
I can see it in my mind: the Circus Maximus at night, the neon sign glowing, the smell of pizza in the air and a Hollywood actor chatting away like an old friend. I’m at the Fratelli Trecca restaurant with brothers Manuel and Nicolò Trecastelli in a warm, lively space where Roman teglia feels like home, real oven heat, a bit of wood, a bit of street. People coming and going, office workers from the neighborhood, tourists taking a break between monuments; the rhythm is that of Rome when it’s real, unfiltered, sincere.
From that casual visit by Tucci, star of “The Hunger Games,” the rest followed naturally. “An agency contacts us and says, Tucci wants to feature your tongue pastrami in his documentary on Italian food, ‘Tucci in Italy.’ He said it’s one of the craziest things he’s ever eaten.” And there it is on screen: Nicolò building the specialone, Tucci taking a bite, the moment entering the wider narrative of contemporary Italian cuisine.
A cuisine that speaks Roman but in a language anyone can understand. In the end, the specialone is just a symbol: one bite of contemporary Rome.
But this story doesn’t begin on camera. It began many years before, and not even in a pizzeria. “Fratelli Trecca is the landing point of everything we’ve done. Circoletto, Trecca, Pantera, our three earlier places. It’s like we took every piece of our story and put it back together,” says Nicolò. speaking with the energy of someone who’s lived long nights, moves, projects and the grind that eventually shapes you. “Here you find everything. The natural wines of Circoletto, the cooked dishes of Trecca, the pizza of Pantera. It’s a mix that tells who we’ve become.” That become hits me, because there’s nothing here that feels engineered.
The pizzeria looks directly onto the Circus Maximus. Outside, Rome is stone and pine trees; inside, it’s a young, honest, alive workshop. Ancient Rome out front, contemporary Rome on the counter.
Then it arrives: the specialone, the pizzetta with tongue pastrami that won over Tucci. Nicolò talks about it the way you talk about a mischievous child. “It was born during Covid. Delivery wasn’t working, more waste than anything. We stopped for a month and asked ourselves, Now what? So we started doing pop-ups. And the first one was this: white base, mustard mayo, romaine lettuce, caramelized onions, pickles, and the tongue pastrami.”
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