Paese che vai, usanza che trovi. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. I’ve tried to follow this with my eating habits this semester. It definitely has paid off, because not only have I learned a lot about Italian dining and enjoyed the process, but I’ve also gained over 50 pounds just from pasta consumption alone.

Italians traditionally have a prolonged lunch during siesta, from 1 to 3 in the afternoon and then an even more prolonged dinner later in the evening. Most restaurants don’t open until 8 p.m. at the earliest.

The dinner crowd doesn’t really show up until after nine. You also can’t go into a restaurant and get on a waiting list for a table. If it’s full, you’re outta luck, because a good Italian dinner will last two or three hours easily. So, once a table at a restaurant is taken, it probably won’t open up again that evening.

A true Italian meal involves multiple courses coming one at a time, starting with the antipasti, the appetizers. My personal favorite is caprese, slices of mozzarella cheese with tomatoes (pomodori). This is real mozzarella, not the Hy-Vee shrink-wrapped variety, with fresh pomodori that were picked two days before. It’s mmmm-mmmm good.

The “first course” then is the pasta dish. There are 15 trillion types of pasta, plus another 15 trillion sauces to combine them with.

There are lots of neat pasta facts, like the difference between rigate and lisce — whether the pasta is ridged or smooth, which affects how the sauce will stick to it. Somewhere, there is some Iowa State engineering graduate designing new, incredibly efficient pasta noodles as you read this.

Speaking of pasta production, last week, I visited a northern town, Parma, where Parmesan cheese was first created. Parma is also famous as the world headquarters of the biggest pasta conglomerate of all, Barilla.

I really impressed the Canadians I was traveling with by telling them I was from Ames, home of the only Barilla factory in the world outside Italy or something like that.

But anyway, no dinner is complete without vino, wine. Vino rosso (red wine) or vino bianca (white) can depend on the meal, although I’m partial to vino rosso with generally everything. It isn’t about alcoholism, it’s just about the culture — a really good meal isn’t complete without a glass of wine. And it’s usually very reasonably priced. At my local alimentari, prices for a bottle of wine start at around 3,500 lira (roughly $2) for the very cheap stuff.

The perfect ending to a good meal is gelato, ice cream. There are two types of gelato. The first is the fresh hand-dipped kind, served at the ristorante or gelatoria. It is heaven on earth. A friend of mine who had visited Italy before kept trying to tell me before I left how great the gelato was. I didn’t believe her. I thought, how great can it really be? I was so, so wrong. The gelato here is infinitely better than anything I’ve ever had before.

The second type of gelato is the small, frozen, in-a-wrapper variety that you can find in coolers at stores approximately every 20 yards on any given street in the city. I see this as the Italians’ way of making up for the almost complete absence of vending machines in the city. If I can’t buy a bag of M&Ms from MU vending whenever I want here, I can always pick up a great Choco-taco or Magnum ice cream bar.

Every block also has a bar, but I’m not talking Cy’s Roost or Welch Ave. Station.

A bar is a place that serves all variations of coffee (caffe), other drinks, simple sandwiches and, in the mornings, cornetti, basically spruced-up croissants. The bar is a staple of Italian life. American coffee is looked down upon, although they offer a poor imitation, caffe Americano, for those pitiful tourists who can’t handle the real stuff. Classic Italian caffe comes in a tiny little cup and goes down in two gulps.

It would be like if you took a two gallon pot of coffee, took all the “coffee power” in it and slapped that condensed version into a shot glass — that’s how intense caffe Italiano is.

Despite the great food environment here, which I’ve barely even scratched the surface of in this column, I do still sometimes have cravings for American food. For example, I’ve had this fixation with corn dogs recently.

I had seen the big street advertisements for them here. They’re actually called “magic hot dogs.” They have a big picture of a soccer player or some athlete with a big smile, holding a gigantic corn dog in front of him, saying, “If you eat this magic hot dog it will revolutionize your life!”

So I found them at the supermercato, bought a bunch and then served them as antipasti before a home-cooked pasta dinner with some friends.

I was so happy. And I had a great idea for a new product, coming from my love for corn dogs and also my love for the gelato tacos (a taco shell filled with ice cream and covered with chocolate) many of the bars have. I’m thinking, magic gelato hot dog – it’s shaped like a corn dog but filled with gelato.

Mmmm-mmmm good.

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Matt Ostanik is a senior in architecture from Washington, Ill.