With the same competence, dexterity and punctuality with which a maître of vast hotel experience organizes the service of dining in the restaurant of a grand hotel, Maria Pellegrini has two fragrant virtual tables inside this fragrant volume, one reserved for specialties culinary more or less "exotic" handed down by Greek authors, the other marked by foods (from time to time simple, rustic and healthy or, on the contrary, overabundant, brainy and harmful) characteristic of Roman cuisine and taste. [...] Can a noble lunch or dinner begin without offering an appetizer of special, unusual, tantalizing delicacy? The one "cooked" by Maria Pellegrini consists of a surprising delicacy, so fanciful it deserves to be chosen as an eponymous "dish" on which to model the title of the entire volume. A "gem", so it comes naturally to define [...] the poem, so far known only to a handful of experts, Iudicium coci et pistoris iudice Vulcano, that is Contrasto between the cook and the baker: Vulcan judge. It is a somewhat bizarre text, consisting of 99 hexameters, not all of impeccable workmanship, of a hypothetically oscillating period between the II and V centuries AD, whose composition is claimed in the first person by an elusive Vespa (from the Preface by Marco Beck ).