This is one lunch you won't want to miss.

August 15, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven, is a national holiday in Italy. Like many other Christian celebrations, it is built upon the crumbled foundation of ancient traditions.

In modern times, Ferragosto is the jumping off day for Italians to escape stifling apartments and head for holiday al mare or in montagna—the sea or the mountains.

August is the worst time for foreigners to explore Italian cities because mostly they’ll encounter overheated, testy tourists like themselves. The living spirit of the cities has been drained out like the color from a faded photograph. More "Pranzo di Ferragosto"

What’s one way to tell if you’ve done a half-way decent job at mothering?

When your daughter returns from a business trip to Rome with a big chunk of formaggio pecorino stagionato. This cheese is the color of antique parchment studded with salt crystals that look like pin pricks. Truly, it looks a little intimidating. But on the tongue, it’s sweet and sharp and surprisingly mellow.

Emma had fun purchasing the aged sheep’s milk at the famed Volpetti food shop in the Testaccio neighborhood. “The guy was so nice. He let me taste it,” she said. (Did I mention that she’s young and beautiful?)

Although Emma can’t remember where it was produced. I checked the product list on the Volpetti Web site and if forced to guess, I’d say Messina in Sicily.

Looking at the photograph, does anyone have a more informed opinion? In the meantime, I’ll be nibbling.

Roberto Bompiani's depiction of an ancient Roman banquet from the Getty Museum.

By Emma Sanders

Guest Writer

Want to shake things up at your next dinner party? Take a cue from the early Romans. Pour Boone’s Farm, Yellowtail Shiraz, and a coveted Super Tuscan wine, but don’t offer your guests a choice. Instead, assign each guest to one of the three wines based on how much you like and value that person relative to his or her dinner companions. (Warning: you may lose some friends in the process.)

This kind of overt rank valuation was common at early Roman banquets, according to Dr. Nicholas Hudson of UNC Wilmington, who recently spoke on the topic at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His lecture, Eat, Drink, and Be Merry:  The Changing Identify of Dining in the Roman World illuminates how styles of dining reflect a changing society.

On early Roman banquets, Pliny writes:

“He apportioned in small flagons three different sorts of wines; but it was not that the guests might take their choice: on the contrary, that they might not choose at all.  One was for himself and me; the next for his friends of lower order (for you must know the measures of friendship according to degrees of quality; and the third for his own free men.”

The Romans also applied this behavior to food, as hilariously summarized by the Latin poet Martial:

“Since I am asked to dinner… why is not the same dinner served to me as to you?  You take oysters fattened in the Lucrine lake, I suck a mussel through a hole in the shell; you get mushrooms, I take hog funguses; you tackle turbot, but I brill.  Golden with fat, a turtle-dove gorges you with its bloated rump; there is set before me magpie that has died in its cage.  Why do I recline with you?”

Over time, banquets shifted from the model of assigning guests social worth. Large sharing dishes became more common. These sharing dishes tended to be very similar in color and design to emphasize consistency of food served across a table. This growing egalitarianism of banquets demonstrated a social and cultural shift from the elitism of early Roman banquets.

In late Rome, a fissure grew between Romans who adopted the newer style of banquets and those who clung to elitism. Dr. Hudson espouses that the newer style of banquets ‑‑based on unity and sharing‑‑ even provided an early precedent for the rituals of Christianity.

To read more about Nicholas Hudson’s work,

visit http://www.archaeological.org/lecturer/nicholashudson

We had fun with our tongue-in-cheek commentary Colosseum ‘Naming Rights’ about the Italian government’s plea for private funding to restore this seminal landmark. Now, we’re eating some of our words.

Diego Della Valle, owner of the wildly successful Tod’s luxury shoe and accessories company, based in Le Marche, has pledged €25 million (approximately $33 million) to the project. The motivation appears to be noble. Della Valle is quoted in the Wall Street Journal, “You won’t find a Tod’s shoe or bag hanging from the Colosseum’s walls. It’s an undertaking with great cultural relevance and that’s enough. We are ambassadors of Italy’s life style and it’s really our duty to give off a strong symbol.”

Meanwhile, the stunning results of a just completed $1.4 million restoration of the Colosseum’s hypogeum (the levels lying below the ground) are the subject of a fascinating article in this month’s Smithsonian. Heinz-Jürgen Beste of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, led a team of German and Italian archeologists in a 14-year project deciphering the functions of the hypogeum. This subterranean nerve center housed elaborate mechanisms for storing—and raising to stage level—the scenery, equipment and wild beasts employed in the lavish, gruesome spectacles.

The Colosseum flourished from the first to sixth centuries AD. After the empire crumbled, the massive structure successively became a stone quarry, a dump, and shopping center. All the while, natural decay took its course eventually burying the hypogeum under 40 feet of soil. During Benito Mussolini’s glorification of ancient Rome in the 1930s, crews excavated the earth hiding the hypogeum but the inner workings remained a mystery.

Thanks to the contributions of Tod’s and the scholarship of Beste and other archeologists, the Colosseum will continue to reveal its wonders. But what about the Italian sites (nearly 40 in all) on the World Monuments Fund Watch Sight? This a list that calls attention to endangered cultural locations.  Pompeii has been on the list since 1996 and is recently in the news because of the increasing rate in which structures there are collapsing.

Pompeii's Temple of Venus

The future of these sites is indeed uncertain.  Newsweek reports in The Ruined Ruins that the 2011 budget of the Italian cultural ministry, which finances most preservation, is $340 million, down from $603 million in 2008. You can learn more about efforts to save Italy’s treasures at the culture watchdog and education group Italia Nostra site.

Tell us what you think about saving Italy’s archeological treasures.

Who should pay for it? Is it worth the cost?

Telecom Italia Colosseum has a certain ring to it. Or maybe Fiat Group Colosseum will triumphantly cruise into the winners circle. But then again,  the Banca Popolare di Milano may have deeper pockets to make the Colosseum its own.

If all goes to plan, a corporation could soon be restoring the Roman Colosseum, one of the most-recognized antiquities in the world.

As Ella Ide of Reuters reports in Italy Turns to Private Sector to Help Colosseum in the Washington Post, the cash-strapped Italian government is looking for a corporate angel to pony up $32 million to completely restore the Colosseum and make it fully accessible to visitors by 2013.

Of course, I’m using the phrase “naming rights” ironically. The article does not specify whether the donor will plaster its name on the facade. Plus, there is precedent. The Vatican carried through a controversial deal with Japan’s Nippon Television Network to fund the restoration of Michaelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. In return, Nippon filmed the entire project and also released a massive coffee table book documenting the process.

Are corporations the new-millenium Medici? Do business conglomerates know the first thing about restoring priceless antiquities? How do you feel about the Colosseum going begging?