once trimmed, they can be deep fried to make one of my all-time favorite roman foods -- carciofi alla giudia, jewish fried artichokes. you know my grandmother and my mother would make these. ask anyone here and they'll tell you that this weird looking vegetable is a definitive roman food. thank you so much. but what i love is that under those rough outer leaves it contains an entire history. a story of how society's outcasts can change the habits of an entire city. these picturesque ruins once contained the misery of rome's jewish ghetto. from the 1500s onwards, the city's entire jewish community was locked in this walled area, only allowed to leave to do menial jobs in the daytime before being locked in at night.