The first thing you see when you walk through the door of Il Pentito is the oven. It's a monolithic, red-brick structure, like a relic from some Industrial Revolution foundry. A massive, dominating presence, it seems to take up half the premises, an impression reinforced by the way the tables are crammed together in careless proximity, as if accommodating customers were an afterthought.

A warm glow fills the room, intermingled with the aroma of wood smoke. The appetizing savor of fresh-baked dough tugs insistently at your nostrils, lest you forget what it is you have gone there for. Little chance of that: Il Pentito has but one raison d'e^tre, and that is to make, bake and dispense pizza.

And it does so in a setting that is truly one of a kind. The interior is so perfectly dingy and patinated that it's hard to believe you're on the ground floor of a modern multistory apartment block in Yoyogi, not inside a back-street eatery under the railway tracks, say, of an industrial suburb of Rome.