Rome is edible. It goes beyond market displays heaving with violet artichokes, bitter puntarelle, and tomatoes that actually taste like something, and the fact there seem to be two gelaterie to every Roman. Rome is edible because even as it swells with traffic and tourists, nature keeps showing up. It pokes through the cracks in the pavement, creeps up the city’s crumbling walls, and droops heavy from trees that dangle olives, citrus, and loquats.

This city, for all its grandeur and grit, is still rooted in the land. While emperors erected marble monuments to their own egos, fields of grain, vineyards, and grazing sheep kept Romans fed. A hundred years ago, you didn’t have to leave the historic center to find farms. Grapevines covered the Janiculum Hill, draping down toward Trastevere. Until the 1720s, another vineyard spread across what’s now the Spanish Steps. The valleys around the Colosseum and the Forum were once farmland, and the Forum itself—long after it stopped being Rome’s political heart—was just a big pasture where cows roamed between crumbling ruins and Christian pilgrimage sites. Sure, most of that has been figuratively paved over, but the agricultural past isn’t gone, it’s camouflaged.

Head out to the Via Appia Antica, one of the oldest roads in Rome, and you’ll pass ancient tombs, broken aqueducts, and a working sheep farm in the Parco della Caffarella. Farther out, Azienda Agricola Verdicchio plants neat rows of chard, radicchio, and broccoli rabe destined for Roman tables. In the neighborhoods of San Paolo and Monte Ciocci, community gardens thrive year-round, providing locals with tomatoes and leafy greens like their ancestors grew. Even in the middle of the city, farming survives. Behind the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, a monastic garden hides behind an iron gate, its rows bursting with medicinal herbs and ancient vegetables. Across town in Trastevere, the cloistered nuns of Santa Cecilia quietly grow a botanical garden and transform its bounty into teas, soaps, and preserves, living proof of a self-sufficiency that’s been going strong since the Middle Ages.

And then there are the wild edibles, the things that sprout up without permission. Capers burst from cracks in the Colosseum and the Aurelian Walls like little acts of botanical rebellion. Wild arugula carpets the Circus of Maxentius with peppery leaves. In the Parco della Caffarella, prickly pears cling to cactus pads, waiting for someone with gloves and guts. Mallow grows in the shade of medieval churches. Mint perfumes the sidewalk cracks. Even the olive trees on the Palatine Hill still bear fruit, just as they did when the Barberini family planted them four hundred years ago.

Rome is a city of contradictions. It’s profane and sacred, modern and ancient, urban and rural, all at once. And while it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the din of motorini and construction and crowds, Rome’s wild side hasn’t gone anywhere.