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SINCE MOVING TO Rome more than six years ago with my partner, I have often been told that this town’s best years are behind it, that this city of ruins — monuments to empires past — is in a constant and inevitable state of entropy. Friends reminisce about a more recent history, when Bar Della Pace was the place to get a drink, when you could still discover antique treasures at bargain prices at the Sunday flea market, when the city’s parks had sufficient resources to maintain the now-ailing umbrella pines, et cetera. And when marveling at the Baths of Caracalla’s expansive vaults or the stunning realism of the bronze “Boxer at Rest,” this retrospective mentality is wholly reinforced. To live in this city long enough is to join these ranks of nostalgics, to witness the slow disappearance of the theater of Roman life.

Our studio apartment has a single, door-sized window that overlooks the massive façade of the Chiesa Nuova, a late-sixteenth-century giant wedged into perspective by two imposing palaces. On one of the street corners across from our window hangs an oval shrine of Madonna and Child, encircled by a gold, mirrored mosaic. Every day, save Wednesdays, we have watched a silver-haired woman with an irregular gait walk down the narrow street between the two palaces, the baroque church to her back. And every night, save Wednesdays, we have seen the Madonna’s halo glow green, reflecting the neon sign of Settimio, the storied trattoria just beneath our window. That woman, Teresa Zazza, has cooked two meals a day, six days a week, for nearly 50 years. Her husband, Mario Zazza, has worked in the restaurant since his teens, when he joined his father — the eponymous Settimio — in running the family business.

Since his earliest days working there, Mario maintained an instinctual vision of how the establishment should be run. As he explained to me in the calm lull before one of his final dinner services, “My father had the mentality that the client was always right, and I didn’t agree with that at all.” Initially, Settimio al Pellegrino had been an osteria. More local hangout than restaurant, it was typically filled with heavy drinking regulars playing cards with “smoke thick enough to cut with a knife” suspended above their heads. Mario imagined something more dignified for the space and wasn’t shy about making his opinion known, which led to public disputes between the younger and elder Zazza. It wasn’t uncommon for young Mario to be dismissed for his stubborn insubordination, left to pass the night sleeping on the stoop of his family’s apartment building around the corner. But Mario’s uncompromising approach gradually won out, and he slowly transformed the trattoria into an institution.

Dining at Settimio followed a series of predefined steps which began even before entering. The storefront windows were frosted, while the locked front-door vestibule was articulated in a way that made it impossible to see the dining room from outside. The first step to eating there was to ring the buzzer and then patiently wait for Mario to welcome you in, or, as may be the case, suggest you find an alternative. In a city center overwhelmed with visitors, Mario’s selection process was less exclusionary than preservationist. He was saving precious resources for his regulars. The airlock was installed in the ’80s, when bigwig politicians frequented the small dining room for work lunches and the glass partition was rumored to be bulletproof for their protection. Mario had a simpler logic: It was installed to prevent cold air rushing into the dining room every time the door opened, and he “didn’t want to have to deal with jerks!”

Upon entering and greeting Mario, always neatly dressed in an oxford shirt and cravat beneath a colorful cashmere sweater — his bushy eyebrows the only rebellious actors of his ensemble — we would head straight to the back of the restaurant, pausing on the threshold of the tiny kitchen to salute Teresa as she worked tirelessly over the forthcoming meal before finding our table. We’d nod to the other regulars, invariably seated in their same positions, a subtle hierarchy denoted by one’s proximity to the kitchen — to be seated at a far table, out of sight from the kitchen, was to be relegated to “Siberia,” as our good friend Peter put it. There was the dottore who ate lunch and dinner every single day in the same exact seat, as well as the avvocato, almost certainly not trained as a lawyer, clad in sunglasses and a bucket hat, who would cross the city daily in a private car to lunch with his driver. The characters changed over the decades, but there has always been intrigue. In the ’60s, a Roman scenographer popularized the restaurant within the city’s creative milieu, and its patrons came to include leading actors and directors of Cinecittà (the largest film studio in Europe), as well as the literati and artists of the “Dolce Vita” era: Alberto Sordi, Marcello Mastroianni, Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, Bernardo Bertolucci.

As at nearly all Italian restaurants, water and wine were offered. The options were binary: sparkling or still; red or white. This allowed for easy decision-making, and prefigured the sort of choice that would be proposed throughout the meal. While Teresa had slightly expanded the menu since she took over the kitchen from Mario’s mother, Ada, in 1975, the core dishes remained. Actual physical menus were scant. Years passed before I caught Mario procuring one for the rare tourist who made it past the door. An interval of time would pass after Mario had delivered the drinks and a basket of bread, the first of such interludes, which allowed for healthy conversation with fellow diners. Provided he wasn’t swamped, Mario would eventually come to take our order for primi: rice with endive on Mondays; generous pillowy gnocchi on Thursdays; handmade fettuccine on Sundays; or Teresa’s famous stracciatella soup.

There was a good chance, however, that, as the sole server of the 11-table dining room, Mario was busy. In this case, he permitted us to order directly with “the management,” aka Teresa in the kitchen. Exchanging pleasantries, we missed a half or even two-thirds of what she barked our way, partially due to the drone of the stove hood but mostly thanks to her dialect. Through one-way jokes and shared laughs, we would eventually communicate our order, practically identical every time, before returning to our table.

Once the primi had been sufficiently devoured, Mario would make his third pass for secondi: polpette, more chunky pan-seared hamburger than meatball, served without sauce (unless you kindly, nearly surreptitiously asked); bollito, made with the highest quality beef from a butcher in Campo de’ Fiori; veal involtini served either with red or white sauce; roast veal; ossobuco. Seafood was added on Fridays: seppie and baccalà. Vegetable side dishes included the ubiquitous cicoria, steamed potatoes, “drunken” Romanesco broccoli cooked in white wine, chard, and perfectly roasted bell peppers. All dishes were presented on sturdy white china. Some of them were drizzled with a precious, bright green olive oil made from the Zazzas’ own trees in the countryside, which Mario himself would distribute directly onto plates, as if liquid gold.

We were once paid 500 milliliters of this currency, handsome compensation for helping unload the couple’s groceries one evening. The trattoria may have been closed Wednesdays, but that didn’t make it a day of rest for Mario and Teresa. In the evenings, we would find their car parked below the apartment, overburdened with a week’s worth of produce and dry goods, and we’d proceed to lug sacks of potatoes and boxes of vegetables back into the kitchen, down into the cavernous cellar below. This weekly good deed gained us the title belli del palazzo (good boys of the building), though the ethic of lending a hand was shared by most regulars, who were accustomed to clearing their own plates after each course or grabbing themselves another bottle of white wine from the polished steel fridges.