In 2025, here's to la scarpetta

lick the bowl, scrape the sides clean, delight in the pleasure of one more bite

It’s a 20-minute walk down narrow corridors of stairs from my house to the Quatieri Spagnoli in Naples. The old Spanish quarter is often seen as the heart of Naples. It’s where the laundry hangs from the balconies of the deteriorated old buildings and the narrow alleyways take you to hidden corners as the mopeds rush by you. Life spills out from the buildings onto the streets, everyone crammed together in organized chaos.

It was the Sunday before Christmas and the shops were open. We popped into one of my favorite artisans, Teresa from Casa Cometa, who makes and designs ceramic pieces. The tiny shop was packed full of locals and we chatted with her lovely staff who asked us about our experience as foreigners in Naples. Soon enough, a young woman entered with a steaming bowl of Nonna’s freshly made ragu. We were offered the slow-roasted Sunday ragu, beef and pork stewed in dark tomato sauce, in little cups and handed pieces of bread to sop up the sauce with.

In true Naples calamity, the tiny little shop began to overfill, as two musicians came into play the zampogna, or Italian bagpipes, which are a Christmas tradition of the Italian south. My arms full of ragu and bread, I took a little dip and smiled as the rich sauce came to my lips, and the sound of the zampogna filled the room.

The staff asked me if I knew what fare la scarpetta meant. I’d heard it before, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. Suddenly, the Neapolitans in the little shop focused all of their attention on us. Nonni’s ragu team, the ceramicist team, and the bagpipers kept interrupting each other, stating it was “very important” for us to understand this, switching to English and using group energy to complete the translation for my monolingual husband.

Fare la scarpetta is when you take a piece of bread and wipe up all the sauce left on your plate, to ensure you enjoy every last drop. It literally means “little shoes” or “slippers” and comes from the idea that shoes drag whatever is on the bottom of them through your house. We nodded enthusiastically. We understood!

I couldn’t believe we came to the shop to buy a gift and we were sitting around discussing Italian traditions while holding a bowl of Nonna’s ragu. What a special Neapolitan moment, showcasing the generosity and open-mindedness of our hosts. Being a guest of this city always reminds me of how Neapolitans can use every ounce of what they’ve got.

As I go through my end-of-year reflections, I’ve been thinking about how this was a hard year for me despite all the wonderful things that happened. Life is like that. It’s never all good or all bad. The hard part is enjoying the good times while they’re there, without worrying about when they’ll come again.

Photo by Nicholas Sorrenti on Unsplash

When I think about my year next year, I want it to be full-on scarpetta. I am not a dainty lady anymore, I do not owe anyone my hands grasped quietly on the napkin in my lap. I will not sit in front of a half-full plate and wonder if I should dare to take another bite. There will be no leftovers in 2025. I want to pluck through a bowl of fluffy white bread, select one with a crunchy edge, drag it through a crimson sauce, and dunk it until my fingers are soaked. When the good times are here I want to grab every last taste of them, letting the flavors sit in my mouth and the fullness satiate my belly.

How do you know when the “good times” are here? Can you recognize the little things enough to savor them? I’ll go back to the best prompt ever created for year-end journaling: what sweetness did you experience this year? (Last year’s post is here). Here is mine: