Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine is at Via dei Cerchi 87, postal code 00186, in the Ripa district, on the long side of the Circus Maximus facing the Palatine: a building with a Baroque front and a stucco hand with its index finger pointed at the sky, a few dozen meters from the intersection with Via di San Teodoro. The most convenient reference point for getting there is the Circo Massimo stop on metro line B, from which it is a five-minute walk along the valley of the circus. On foot from the Colosseum it takes just under 10 minutes, from the Bocca della Verità seven. Entry to the BiblioMuseo is free and the visit is by appointment: the museum gives the number +39 391 3846470 and the address info@museodellacucina.com for setting a day and time, and announces extraordinary weekend openings on its website. There are no tickets to buy, no ticket office, no line. Anyone who arrives without having called finds a closed door. The sensible minimum time for the visit is an hour and a half, and two if you read the cards on the books.

The collection is the one put together over 40 years by Rossano Boscolo, a cook and pastry chef born in Chioggia in 1956, founder of the Etoile Academy and collector of old gastronomy texts. The museum opened on August 6, 2021 and is, as it is conceived, a rare case in Italy: one floor of kitchen tools and one floor of books, held together by the idea that the history of cooking is studied in volumes and understood through objects. If you want to place it within the neighborhood, the valley in front of the door is that of the Circus Maximus, and the natural walk continues toward the Forum Boarium and the Mouth of Truth.

Where Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine Is and How to Get There

Via dei Cerchi is one of the most misunderstood streets in the center of Rome. Thousands of people walk along it every day convinced they are skirting a meadow, and in fact they are skirting a meadow. It is just that this meadow is the arena of the largest building for spectacles ever built since antiquity, and the street that runs alongside it carries the memory of the circus itself in its name. The place name comes from the popular corruption of the word circus, passing through the form Via del Cerchio before settling into the plural. Beneath the asphalt runs an ancient track, the vicus that recalled the underground altar of Consus, the deity of the buried granaries to whom the Consualia were dedicated, the festivals during which, according to legend, the Rape of the Sabine Women took place.

The Exact Address and the Door of the Garum

The street number is 87. There is no monumental sign, no flag, no state-museum entrance with turnstiles. There is a door set in a facade that, if you look at it from the other side of the street, you recognize immediately by its strangeness: a 1600s front built like a theatrical wing, crowned by the hand with its index finger raised. Anyone looking for a modern building walks past. It often happens that people overshoot the entrance by 20 meters, because their head is already inside the greenery of the circus and the door stays behind them.

By Metro and on Foot to Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

The Circo Massimo station on metro line B is the most direct way. You come out at the eastern short side of the valley, take the sidewalk that runs along the circus toward the Tiber and in five minutes of easy walking, with no stairs and no climbs, you arrive in front of number 87. Those coming from the historic center can walk: from the Colosseum you go down Via di San Gregorio, from the Forum Boarium you go up Via dei Cerchi against the flow of traffic. The surface lines serving the area pass along Via del Circo Massimo and Viale Aventino, and the most reliable way to know which ones stop closest to the door on the day of your visit is the app of Rome’s transit company, because routes change with construction work and events in the valley.

By Car, Taxi and Bicycle

The street is outside the limited traffic zone of the historic center, which makes arriving by taxi simple and parking a serious problem. Parking along Via dei Cerchi during the day is a lottery that you almost always lose. If you are getting around by car, it is best to leave it in the outer park-and-ride lots and finish by metro. By bicycle, on the other hand, the location is excellent: the bike path that comes down from the Colosseum and the ring around the valley let you get almost to the door, and the racks are found along the perimeter of the circus. One practical detail that seems trivial and is not: the street runs on a slight slope and on rainy days the water flows down toward the Velabro, so canvas shoes are a questionable choice.

Hours, Entry and Booking at the Garum

Here lies the substantial difference from a municipal or state museum: there is no continuous schedule every day. The BiblioMuseo is visited by appointment and entry is free. Weekend openings are announced case by case, as are the events that occupy the piano nobile of the building. To arrange a visit outside the announced openings the museum asks you to contact it directly at the contacts given on the official website, museodellacucina.com. Anyone who wants to consult the volumes for research, and not simply see them in the display cases, asks for a specific appointment.

Why Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine Opens by Appointment

The reason is structural and worth understanding, because it avoids disappointment. The building does not belong to the museum: the collection is housed in a property of the Olivetan fathers, and the same spaces also work as a venue for events, concerts and dinners. A museum with a permanent custodian and eight hours of daily opening requires staff that a private collection with free entry cannot afford. The consequence is that the calendar follows the availability of the rooms and the people. Many small private museums in Rome close within three years, and in our view this formula is the only sustainable one: better a free museum that opens when it can, and that when it opens has someone with you who knows what they are talking about, than a paid museum that always opens and has nobody in the room.

How Long It Takes to Visit Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

An hour and a half for a normal visit. A good two hours if you stop to read the captions of the books on display, and there are 127 volumes. If you have a professional interest, cooks, pastry chefs, food historians, students of gastronomic sciences, allow half a day and ask in advance to be able to see the pieces that interest you. The collection is not exhausted by what is on display: the library declares about 3,500 volumes, of which about 2,000 are first editions, and the part visible in the cases is a reasoned selection.

What Garum Is and Why It Gives the Museum Its Name

The name is not a whim. Garum was the liquid sauce of fermented fish with which the Romans seasoned an enormous part of their cooking, and calling a gastronomy museum by this name means declaring, from the sign onward, that the history of Italian taste begins long before the tomato. It was made by putting fish innards and small fish, sand smelt, red mullet, anchovies, into a container, alternating them with layers of salt and leaving them to ferment in the sun for weeks, with regular stirring. The liquid that drained off was collected and filtered. There was also a quick version, obtained with a very concentrated brine and boiling, which served those who could not wait the months of slow fermentation.

Garum, Liquamen, Muria, Allec: Four Words That Are Not Synonyms

Anyone reading ancient recipes immediately stumbles on a terminology that popular handbooks flatten. Liquamen is the liquid that separates during fermentation. Allec is the solid residue that remains at the bottom, the bottom of the barrel, the poor part that ended up on the tables of those who could afford nothing else. Muria is the brine. Garum, in its strictest sense, is the refined product. The distinction is not pedantry: it says that around a single process there was a scale of prices and quality, from the equivalent of a fine colatura to the residue of the common mess hall. Garum sociorum, the most prized variety, came from Spain and cost as much as a perfume.

The Ancient Sources on Garum and the Silence of Apicius

Pliny the Elder describes it as a sought-after liquor obtained from fermented innards. Columella mentions it in the De re rustica also as a veterinary remedy, which says how widespread its presence was in country houses. Gargilius Martialis hands down recipes with precise proportions. And then there is the most curious case of all: Apicius, the author to whom the De re coquinaria is attributed, uses garum in dozens of preparations but never gives the recipe. It is the behavior of someone writing for readers who buy that product already made, like a cookbook of today that says extra virgin olive oil without explaining how an olive is pressed. This absence is the most eloquent detail you can tell in front of a display case: ancient Roman cooking was a market cuisine, not a do-it-yourself one.

The De re coquinaria, the Ghost Book of Ancient Cooking

The De re coquinaria we read today is not the book of one man. In the form in which it has come down to us it probably dates to the 5th century, and the language gives it away: closer to vulgar Latin than to classical. Inside is an older core, which may truly go back to the Marcus Gavius Apicius of the 1st century, the legendary gastronome of the Tiberian age. The rest is stratification, additions by generations of copyists and cooks. The work is divided into 10 books with Greek titles: Epimeles for drinks, sauces and seasonings. Sarcoptes for sausages. Cepuros for vegetables. Pandecter for salads and soups. Ospreon for legumes. Aeropetes for fowl. Polyteles for roasts, mushrooms, tubers and eggs. Tetrapus for game and livestock. Thalassa for fish and seafood. Halieus for fish sauces. There is also a medieval epitome of the work from the Carolingian age, the Apici excerpta a Vinidario.

Where Garum Was Made and What Became of It

The factories were real establishments, with masonry vats, and they produced stink at such levels that they were kept at the edges of cities. Pompeii and Leptis Magna were important centers, and Campania a production district. The best garum, that of the socii, came from the Iberian peninsula, in a supply chain whose roots lay in the Phoenician tradition. Then the word disappears from European kitchens, but the product does not: the colatura di alici of Cetara, in Campania, and the garum of Maratea, in Basilicata, are the direct descendants of that technique. Anyone who truly wants to understand what the Romans ate should buy a bottle of colatura and use it in place of salt in a plate of spaghetti with garlic and parsley. It costs little and teaches more than 10 pages of a handbook.

A Book on Fish Inside the Garum Collection

In the library there is a volume that closes the circle with the name of the museum: the De Romanis piscibus libellus by Paolo Giovio, edition of 1531. Giovio, a bishop and historian, wrote a short treatise on Roman fish in elegant Latin, dedicating it to a cardinal of the Bourbon family. It is the kind of book that explains why a gastronomy collection is not a collection of cookbooks: inside are treatises on ichthyology, agronomy, medicine, the science of preserves. Cooking, before it was a trade, was a chapter of natural history.

The Building on Via dei Cerchi: Lupercale, Sant’Anastasia, Olivetans

The ground on which the museum stands is one of the densest in layers in all of Rome, and it is worth carefully separating what is documented from what is legend, because here the two have overlapped for 2,000 years.

The Lupercale: The Legend, the Sources, the Cave of 2007

The Lupercale was a cave at the foot of the Palatine, turned into a sanctuary dedicated to Faunus Lupercus. Roman tradition placed there the finding of Romulus and Remus by the shepherd Faustulus and the nursing of the twins by the she-wolf. The ancient sources are not unanimous on the exact position: Velleius Paterculus places it at the foot of the Palatine, and the Renaissance antiquarians waver between the road leading to the Circus Maximus and the Appian Way, according to Flavio Biondo, and a piazza at the foot of the hill, according to Andrea Fulvio. In January 2007 the archaeologist Irene Iacopi announced the discovery of a cavity under the House of Augustus, 15 meters deep, nine meters high and seven and a half wide, with a vault decorated with mosaics, shells and a white eagle. The identification with the Lupercale was accepted by some scholars, including Andrea Carandini, and contested by others, who recognized in it rather a fountain or a nymphaeum. Anyone who tells you the matter as an established fact is selling you a certainty that does not exist.

Sant’Anastasia, a 4th-Century Titulus Next to the Museum

Next to the building stands the basilica of Sant’Anastasia al Palatino, built in the first decades of the 4th century, perhaps between 325 and 326, over pre-existing Roman structures, set against the outer enclosure of the Circus Maximus where there used to be shops and private buildings along the road. Its titulus is already recorded in the acts of the synod of 499, which places it among the oldest churches in the city. It was restored by a sequence of pontiffs, from Damasus I to Leo III. The present appearance is due to the restoration ordered by Urban VIII Barberini in 1636, with 1800s work by Pius VII and Pius IX. It remains a station church and a minor basilica, and today it is the national church of the Peruvian community and of the Indian community of the Syro-Malabar rite. The museum’s presentation describes it as the first Christian church of the ancient City: the absolute primacy belongs to tradition, the antiquity of the titulus to the document.

The Olivetan Monastery and the Curtain Facade

The complex passed to the Olivetan fathers, a Benedictine congregation, who are its owners still today. The front you see from Via dei Cerchi was built in the 1600s and functioned as a monumental access toward the Farnese Gardens, the large garden that the Farnese had laid out on the ruins of the Palatine. It is an anomalous facade: built like a theatrical wing, without the volume of building you would expect behind it, with the air of a theatrical backdrop left standing after the show is over. Whoever enters the museum therefore crosses a piece of Baroque scenery before reaching the display cases.

The Hand of Cicero

The marble hand with its raised index finger that crowns the front has a story that deserves more than the 30 seconds passersby give it. It came from the medieval church of Santa Maria de Manu, documented from the 12th century, and in all likelihood belonged to a colossal acrolithic statue of the Roman age: one of those images in which only the uncovered parts were marble and the rest was a covering. In the 1600s the hand was moved to the facade. Romans christened it the hand of Cicero and attributed to it a prosaic function: the index finger was supposed to point out the price of wine, one baiocco per measure. What you see at the top today is a stucco copy. The church of Santa Maria de Manu was demolished in 1939 and its apse is still visible. Between the topographical descriptions of the street and the museum’s presentation, the street number attributed to the facade with the hand does not always coincide: standing in front of the door at number 87, what matters is that the Baroque front with the hand is along the same stretch of Via dei Cerchi, a few meters away.

Via dei Cerchi From Sixtus V to the Gas Works

The street as we walk it today was opened around 1587 by Sixtus V, the pope who was reorganizing Rome with strokes of straight axes and obelisks, to ease the transport of the two obelisks removed from the Circus Maximus. Then came the industrial 1800s: in 1853 the city’s first gas plant was set up on this street, that of the Anglo-Roman company, which lit Rome until 1910. We gladly forget that the valley of the Circus Maximus was for decades a productive area, with gasometers and depots. The tidy greenery you see now is a recent invention, and like almost everything in Rome it is less ancient than it seems.

The Museum on the Lower Floor: The Tools, Display Case by Display Case

The street-level floor houses the objects. The overall collection of utensils declared by the collector is around 4,000 pieces, of which about 1,000 are on rotating display, arranged in thematic display cases. It is not a museum of silver cutlery and table services. It is a museum of work tools, molds, machines, irons that produced food for generations of people. The difference is felt immediately. The things have signs of use, dents, worn handles. If you are looking for the shiny, sterile display case, this is not your museum.

Garum Case 1: Speculoos and the Molds of Flanders

It opens with the gingerbread cookies of Flanders and the Netherlands, those spiced with cinnamon, cloves and cardamom, traditionally tied to the December festivities and to St. Nicholas. The carved wooden molds are the main attraction: a 1700s multiple mold, two 1800s matrices, a late 1800s bronze mold and a contemporary example that serves to show the continuity of the gesture. Anyone who does not know the technique does not immediately understand what they are seeing: the dough was pressed into the carving in negative, turned out, baked, and the figure remained. They were edible printed images, in an age when the printed image cost money. A cookie was also a holy card, a portrait of a sovereign, a hunting scene.

Garum Case 2: Molds for Sweets

The second case continues along the thread of molds, widening the field to home and shop pastry making. Here the interesting reading concerns the materials: wood, terracotta, tin, tinned copper, and then the revolution of industrial metals. Each change of material corresponds to a change of oven temperature, baking times, price. A copper mold conducts heat differently from a terracotta one, and the recipe adapts to the tool more often than the tool adapts to the recipe. It is one of the few things that a museum of objects teaches and a book does not.

Garum Cases 3 and 4: Solid Chocolate and Its Molds

Two whole cases are devoted to chocolate molds, and there is a precise historical reason: until the end of the 1700s chocolate in Europe was consumed mostly liquid, as a drink, and only from the early 1800s did solid compositions begin to be produced. From then on the mold becomes the heart of the trade. In the case you see in succession old tin molds in the shape of statuettes, industrially produced chocolate coins, pretzel molds, Christmas log molds, an Italian mold from the Fascist colonial era depicting a pineapple, a French Belle Époque mold with a man on a velocipede, three Bakelite molds and a series in brass of Turkish origin. Lined up, they tell a century and a half of social history: chocolate that goes from a liquid court luxury to a mass-market figurine, then propaganda, then souvenir.

The Case of Chocolate and Fasting

A curiosity tied to this case: in the library upstairs is kept a volume from 1748 by Daniele Concina, historical memoirs on the use of chocolate during fasting. The theological question was deadly serious and kept moralists and confessors busy for decades: does drinking chocolate break the fast or not, being liquid but nourishing? The answer changed depending on the school, and behind the dispute you glimpse the real problem, which was the entry of an exotic, costly and stimulating substance into the daily life of European Christendom. The objects downstairs and the books upstairs speak to each other constantly, and this is the right way to visit the museum.

Garum Cases 5 and 6: The Kitchen Miscellany

These are the most crowded cases and the most interesting, because they contain the things that nobody thinks of keeping. A French baguette slicer from the late 1800s. A large cutting board of the same period. A French double boiler in copper and ceramic, late 1700s. A multiple knife sharpener of the Kent brand, around 1890. A French baking pan from the late 1800s and a military field baking pan. Two ceramic monastic refectory bowls, one from the early 1700s and one from the middle of the century, plus a decorated bowl from the late 1700s. And a Rosier coal stove from 1880, which is the piece that stops visitors the longest.

The monastic refectory bowls deserve a pause. They are poor objects, without decoration, made for a meal eaten in silence while a brother read aloud. The Benedictine rule shaped for centuries the way half of Europe ate: fixed hours, measured portions, silence, reading. Many of our table habits, including those we think of as bourgeois and 1800s, have a monastic root. Seeing them here, 20 meters from an Olivetan monastery that is still active, gives the case a weight that a caption cannot give.

The Children’s Kitchen Game of 1898

In the miscellany is displayed the piece the museum cites most often: the first kitchen game for children, produced in Ravensburg in 1898. It is a German game box, the ancestor of all the toy kitchens that fill children’s bedrooms. The interesting fact is not the date but the reasoning behind it: at the end of the 1800s the domestic kitchen becomes an object of education and the bourgeoisie begins to teach children, and above all girls, a domestic trade through play. The same decade in which Artusi came out in Italy. The game and the manual are born from the same impulse: to codify kitchen knowledge and pass it on in written, reproducible form.

Garum Case 7: Bread, Pasta and Grains

Devoted to the world of pasta and grains, this case is the one where the scale of the objects changes. There are a millstone, a wooden kneading machine from the very early 1900s, trestle presses for pasta, a large mixer datable to around 1830, a grain mill from the early Middle Ages, a large copper grain measure from the second half of the 1800s, the first edition of a book on the history of bread and a 1950s madia holding a collection of pasta cutters and cookie cutters. The early medieval millstone is the oldest object on the route and should be looked at carefully: it is the machine that fed Europe for a thousand years, and it has barely changed since the Roman age.

The Press, the Die and the Prejudice About Pasta

In front of the trestle presses one of the hardest-dying legends collapses, that of Marco Polo supposedly bringing pasta from China. Dry pasta in Italy is documented centuries earlier, and the press with a die is the technology that makes producing it in quantity possible. Looking at these tools you also understand why certain shapes exist and others do not: the shape of pasta is the result of the hole in the die, of the bronze or Teflon, of the pressure applied. The history of maccheroni is a history of engineering, before it is one of regional fantasy.

Garum Case 8: Ice Cream Making and the Dairy Arts

Gelato is the field where the collection gives its best. In the case there are a wooden sorbet freezer from 1880, a field icebox, a copper sorbet holder from the 1700s, a series of ice molds, sorbet molds datable between the early 1800s and the mid-1900s, a sorbet mold dated 1653, a French copper ice cream holder with cork and glass from the early 1800s, a 1800s cheese spino, churns for butter from the same century, churns with a glass body from the first half of the 1900s, wooden butter molds. Two technical texts complete the case, including a 1800s treatise on improving cheese making.

The sorbet mold of 1653 is the piece I always cite when someone says gelato is a modern invention. An object like that presupposes a whole supply chain: gathering snow in the mountains, the snow pits, night transport, storage in straw, the trades tied to cold. In Rome the sale of snow was a regulated and profitable activity. Cold, before electricity, was a seasonal luxury good, and whoever knew how to manage it became rich.

Garum Case 9: Pastry Making and Marzipan Molds

It opens with a series of molds for marzipan cookies. The first piece is a 1700s terracotta mold with the arms of the Habsburgs: the sweet as an instrument of dynastic display, served at table to remind guests who was in charge. Next comes a series of 1800s molds for marzipan and cookies in stone and plaster. Then the first edition of the practical guide for apprentice pastry chefs and confectioners by Giuseppe Ciocca, wafer irons for hosts, cookies and wafer sheets with a range of dates from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, a candy machine with interchangeable rollers from the late 1800s, a wafer iron from the early 1700s and a 1800s pastry syringe with an interchangeable tip.

The wafer irons for hosts are the object that links pastry making to the liturgy. The same iron that baked the consecrated host baked, in other hands, the fairground wafer. The pinch of dough between two engraved plates is one of the oldest and most stable techniques in the history of European sweets, and its descent reaches all the way to waffles and the pizzelle of Abruzzo that are still found in bakeries today.

Garum Case 10: Foie Gras Terrines

The last case gathers foie gras terrines, artifacts that belong fully to the French gastronomic tradition. The shapes are zoomorphic: fawn, bull, boar, duck, rabbit. The container declared its contents, in an age when the label did not exist and the table spoke through images. Almost all the pieces are of French or Portuguese make, with one Italian exception: terrine number one is a terracotta from the first Ginori production of the early 1900s. If you are interested in the history of tableware ceramics, that single terrine is worth the trip more than all the rest of the case.

From Baroque Molds to Gas Stoves: The Thread of the Route

The museum sums up its own chronological arc with an effective formula: from the Baroque molds for gelato of the early 1600s to the gas stoves of the 1950s. In between are the Tuscan mezzine of the 1800s, contemporary pasta machines, designer pots and pans of the second half of the 1900s. The route is not organized in chronological order but by subject, and this is a choice that works: following the thread of chocolate, bread, gelato, you see how each supply chain had a different speed of innovation. Bread making changes slowly for millennia and then all at once in the 1800s. Gelato is already mature in the 1600s. Solid chocolate was born yesterday.

The Library of Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine: The Floor of Books

The upper floor is occupied entirely by the library, and here the museum changes nature. Downstairs you look at objects, upstairs you read. The permanent exhibition counts 127 volumes, selected from a collection that the collector declares at around 3,500 titles, with about 2,000 first editions. To these is added a holding of about 3,500 historical menus, acquired more recently. Its size places the collection among the most important private gastronomy collections in Italy. This is the formula the museum itself uses, and it is an honest formula, because comparison with the great European public collections is played on different parameters, chronological depth against number of pieces.

How the Display of Books Is Organized

The volumes are displayed in cases along the perimeter of the floor, in a sequence that follows both chronology and subjects: the Renaissance treatises, the stewards and carvers, dietetic medicine, the French, pastry making, Italian regional cooking, the 1900s. Each volume on display has a catalog card that can be consulted online, with a bibliological and bibliographic description, accompanied by recipes and information drawn from the work itself. The complete list of the titles on show is published on the museum’s website, on the page dedicated to the books on display, and reading it before you go changes the visit: you arrive knowing which two or three books to really stop in front of.

Platina, or the First Printed Cookbook

You begin with Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, humanist, prefect of the Vatican Library, author of the De honesta voluptate ac valetudine: the 1517 edition is on show. It is the text that marks the passage of cooking from manuscript to print and, above all, from recipe collection to treatise. Platina does not write for cooks, he writes for lords: he combines dietary precepts of the Galenic school, the morality of honest pleasure, and recipes. Studies trace a large part of the culinary material in his book to the cook Martino, the 1400s master whom Platina knew and reworked, and it is one of the very few times that history hands us the name of a professional cook before the 1500s.

Bartolomeo Scappi, the Secret Cook of Pius V

The piece that any historian of food would come to see is the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi, 1570 edition, printed in Venice by Tramezzino. Scappi was born in 1500 in Dumenza, in the province of Varese, and died in Rome on April 13, 1577. He was cook to Pius IV and then secret cook to Pius V, and the title of the book declares it on the cover. The work is divided into six books and tops a thousand recipes. It describes the tools of the kitchen with engraved plates worth a chapter of industrial archaeology, and it contains what is indicated as the first known depiction of a fork. There are recipes for pasta, stuffed pasta, pies, puff pastry, and there is the synthesis between medieval dietetics and modern gastronomy. The success was such that the book was reprinted regularly until 1643, with editions in 1605, 1610, 1622 and 1643.

In front of this case it is worth remembering: Scappi is not just a recipe book, it is a manual of organization. It tells how a papal kitchen is set up, how supplies are managed, how a banquet is served in a city without refrigerators. Anyone who works today in a kitchen brigade recognizes the structure of their own trade in pages written 450 years ago. The difference between a cook and a head cook is already all written there.

Messisbugo, Cervio, Rossetti: The Court, the Carver, the Steward

Next to Scappi lines up the literature of the great court services. Cristoforo da Messisbugo, with the Libro novo of 1552, tells of the Este court of Ferrara and its spectacular banquets. Vincenzo Cervio signs Il Trinciante, present in two editions, 1593 and 1604: an entire treatise dedicated to the art of cutting meat in the air, in front of the diners, with the fork stuck in the piece and the knife working without resting. It was a performance, not a service. Giovanni Battista Rossetti writes Dello scalco in 1584, Cesare Evitascandalo Il maestro di casa in 1620, Antonio Frugoli the Pratica e scalcaria in 1638, Antonio Latini Lo scalco alla moderna in 1692, Anton Francesco Fedele the Mastro di casa universal in 1666. Lined up, these books draw an organization chart: the steward who plans the meal, the carver who performs it on stage, the household master who keeps the accounts. The Renaissance kitchen was a business with a job description.

Latini and the First Tomato Sauce

Antonio Latini, with Lo scalco alla moderna of 1692, has a title of glory worth a long stop: studies on food indicate his treatise as the first printed text in which recipes with tomato in the Spanish manner appear. The tomato arrives in Europe in the 1500s and remains for more than a century a suspect botanical curiosity, grown for ornament and feared as a nightshade. The passage from the greenhouse to the sauce takes 150 years. Every time someone tells you that Italian cooking is thousands of years old and unchanging, think of this date: 1692, that is, yesterday.

Medicine in the Kitchen: Mattioli, Durante, Savonarola

A whole section of the library contradicts the separation between kitchen and pharmacy. There are the Discorsi of Pietro Andrea Mattioli, a physician from Siena, in the 1744 edition. Il tesoro della sanità by Castore Durante of 1596. The Libro della natura et virtu delle cose che nutriscono by Michele Savonarola and Bartolomeo Boldo, 1576. The treatise by Vincenzo Buzio of 1653 on the hot, cold and temperate drinks of the ancients. For centuries food was first of all a medicine, classified by quality, hot or cold, dry or moist, and the recipe was a prescription. This explains why there is so much spice in ancient sauces: not only taste, but correction of the humors. The turning point comes in the French 1600s, when cooking stops healing and starts pleasing.

Mushrooms, Sorbets and Chocolate: The Monographs

In the collection there are monographs worth a visit on their own. The description of the most common edible mushrooms by Carlo Vittadini, 1835, and the Iconographia Mycologica of Giacomo Bresadola, 1927: two monuments of Italian mycology, born from the very concrete need not to die of poisoning. De’ sorbetti, a medical and physical essay by Filippo Baldini, 1775, which discusses sorbets as therapeutic remedies. The memoirs of Daniele Concina of 1748 on chocolate during fasting. And the De Romanis piscibus of Paolo Giovio, 1531, which brings the discussion back to the garum from which the museum takes its name.

Parmentier, Appert and the Food Revolution

Four titles by Antoine Augustin Parmentier are one of the most significant cores of the library: the notice to city and country bakers of 1784, the treatise on pommes de terre, that is potatoes, of 1802, the book on maize or Turkey wheat of 1812, the art of making bread of 1813. Parmentier is the man who convinced France to eat potatoes, and he did it with a communication campaign that would be studied today in a marketing school. Next to them, Nicolas Appert with L’art de conserver of 1810 and Le conservateur of 1842: the invention of hermetic preservation by heating, that is, the direct ancestor of the tin can. Between these two authors runs the line that separates cyclical hunger from modern abundance. In a museum of cooking it is the least showy section and the most important.

The French: La Varenne, Menon, Carême, Escoffier

The library follows precisely the construction of the French canon. Le Cuisinier François by François Pierre de La Varenne, 1658 edition, with the Italian translation of 1802: the book that breaks with the spiced Renaissance cooking and founds the taste for stocks, butters, sauces. L’Art de bien traiter by L.S.R. of 1674. L’Ecole parfaite des officiers de bouche by Massialot, 1680, and his Nouvelle instruction sur les confitures of 1705. Les dons de Comus by Marin, 1758. Le Cuisinier moderne by Vincent La Chapelle, 1742. And then Menon, with La Cuisinière bourgeoise in the 1746 and 1756 editions and La Science du maître d’hôtel cuisinier of 1749: the moment when the recipe book leaves the courts and enters bourgeois homes.

Antonin Carême is present with Le Pâtissier royal parisien of 1815, Le Pâtissier pittoresque of 1842 and L’Art de la cuisine française of 1843. Carême is the cook who turns pastry making into architecture, literally: his pièces montées are projects drawn with ruler and compass. Auguste Escoffier closes the sequence with Le Guide Culinaire of 1903, Le Livre des Menus of 1912 and a small treatise on rice of 1927. Between Carême and Escoffier runs the century in which French cooking organizes itself into a system reproducible anywhere, from kitchen brigades to hotels: it is the globalization of the trade, a century before the word.

Jules Gouffé, Urbain Dubois and the Illustrated Book

The Livre de cuisine by Jules Gouffé, 1867, with the Italian translation of 1895, and Le Livre de pâtisserie of 1873 introduce an element that changes the publishing history of gastronomy: the color plate. La Cuisine classique by Urbain Dubois and Émile Bernard, 1856, with the Italian version of 1877, codifies Russian-style service, dishes served in sequence instead of all together on the table. It is a revolution that changed the way we eat far more than any recipe: the menu in order, the course that arrives hot, the waiter who serves. Le Glacier classique et artistique by Lacam and Charabot, 1893, does the same for ice cream making.

Pellegrino Artusi, First Edition 1891

In the case is the first edition of La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, 1891. It is not a book like the others and it is worth explaining why. Artusi was a silk merchant from Romagna who had moved to Florence, not a cook. He published the manual at his own expense after publishers had rejected it, and he built it up in the following years on the letters that readers sent him, correcting, adding, answering. The result is the first Italian cookbook that speaks an Italian understandable from Turin to Palermo, in a country that still spoke little Italian. Historiography recognizes in him a role in building national identity comparable to that of school textbooks. In front of that modest cover it is worth remembering that success came slowly and that the editions multiplied only after years.

The Italians of the 1800s: Corrado, Agnoletti, Cavalcanti, Vialardi

Before and around Artusi the library lines up the Italy of pre-unification cookbooks. Vincenzo Corrado with the daily meals varied in 672 dishes, 1809. Vincenzo Agnoletti with the new economical cooking of 1803 and the manual for the cook and the pastry chef of 1832. Ippolito Cavalcanti, Duke of Buonvicino, with the Cucina teorico pratica of 1859, the book that contains the appendix in Neapolitan dialect and the recipe for vermicelli with tomato that set the standard. Giovanni Vialardi, cook of the House of Savoy, with the treatise on modern cooking and pastry making of 1904 and the Cucina borghese semplice ed economica of 1880. La Cucina casereccia in two editions, 1820 and 1838. Francesco Chapusot with La vera cucina casalinga of 1851. Giuseppe Sorbiatti with La gastronomia moderna of 1866, Giovanni Nelli with Il re dei cuochi of 1875, Vitaliano Bossi with L’imperatore dei cuochi of 1894.

Regional Cuisines Before They Were Called That

The most useful section for understanding Italy is that of the local cookbooks. La vera cucina genovese by Emanuele Rossi, 1865. La cuciniera genovese by Giovanni Battista Ratto in the 1877 edition. Il cuoco milanese and la cuciniera piemontese of 1860. La cucina casareccia napoletana by Rosa Aiello, 1940. La Cucina triestina by Maria Stelvio, 1927. And then the two books that build the concept of regional cuisine at a desk: Il ventre dei popoli by Alberto Cougnet, 1905, and La nuova cucina delle specialità regionali by Vittorio Agnetti, 1913. Italian regional cooking, as a mental category, was born there, at the start of the 1900s, and not in the mists of time. It is one of the things that anyone who guides tourists should know and almost nobody tells.

The 1900s: Marinetti, Dietetics, the Science of Nutrition

The futurist cookbook of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1932, is the book that makes you smile and that instead deserves respect: it abolished pastasciutta, proposed meals as total works of art, mixed perfumes, music and tactilism. Behind the provocation there was a serious intuition, that the meal is a multisensory experience that can be designed, which is exactly the premise of contemporary chef-driven cooking. Next to it, the dietetics of the early 1900s: the cooking for weak stomachs by Angelo Dubini, 1923. The cuoca medichessa by Lidia Morelli, known as Donna Clara, 1932. The regime without renunciations by the Bergamo sisters, 1933. The vegetarian cooking of Duke Enrico Alliata di Salaparuta, 1930, which is also a small treatise of naturist philosophy. The art of eating little by Horace Fletcher, Italian edition 1909, which preached prolonged chewing as the key to health. The dietary rules of Giulio Casalini, 1931. The book by Mario Acqua on feeding children, 1945. La cucina per la salute di tutti by Paul Carton, 1937.

The Women Who Wrote the Italian Home

A chapter that the museum displays without rhetoric and that is worth reading just as it is. Lidia Morelli with Dalla cucina al salotto, encyclopedia of domestic life. Giulia Lazzari Turco with the Manuale pratico di cucina of 1904 and Il piccolo focolare of 1921. Giulia Ferraris Tamburini with Come posso mangiar bene, 1921. Elvezia Tramontani Rossi with Alimentazione economica, 1919. Il Grillo del focolare with Mangiar bene e spender poco, 1917. These are the books that trained more cooks than any academy: manuals of home economics in which the recipe lives side by side with the family budget, preserving, mending. The history of Italian cooking passes through these pages far more than through the great banquets, and a collection that displays them next to Scappi makes a precise historiographical choice.

The Books of Autarky

In the 1900s sequence three titles appear that tell an era without needing comment: Le massaie contro le sanzioni by Lidia Morelli, 1935. The Alimentazione antisanzionista, practical recipe book, 1936. And the book by Federico Clementi on raising the egg-laying hen in the city, 1935. These are the years of the League of Nations sanctions against Italy after the aggression against Ethiopia, and cooking becomes an instrument of propaganda: replacing imported products, using substitutes, raising hens on city balconies. Next to them, the Ricettario del Cuciniere militare of 1929 and the Genepesca recipe book of 1937, which invited readers to bring Atlantic fish to Italian tables. They are the most uncomfortable books in the library and they are also the ones that teach the most: the cooking of a country is better understood when something is missing than when everything abounds.

Industrial Pastry Making: The Ciocca Collection

Giuseppe Ciocca is the most represented author on display, with 10 titles between 1913 and 1963: the modern pastry chef and confectioner in three editions, the manuals on ice creams, cold desserts, refreshments and cooling drinks in three different years, the guide for apprentices, the candy maker, chocolate pralines and fantasies, modern artistic pastry making. A collection so concentrated on a single author is not by chance: for half a century Ciocca was the reference manual of Italian workshops, the book greasy with sugar sitting on the shelf above the marble counter. Its massive presence says that this library was born from the hands of a professional, not those of a pure bibliophile.

The Curiosities: The Beat Generation Cook Book and the Cooking of Love

Among the volumes on display are two titles that put you in a good mood and that tell well the eclecticism of the collection. The Beat Generation Cook Book by Carl Larsen, 1961, illustrated cookbook of the American counterculture. And La cucina dell’amore by Omero Rompini, 1926, an aphrodisiac culinary manual, an editorial genre with a longer and more serious tradition than the title lets you think. Then Il ghiottone errante by Paolo Monelli, 1935, the first great Italian gastronomic journey written by a journalist, and Il Cucchiaio d’Argento in the 1950 edition, the book that taught three generations to cook.

The Collection of Historical Menus

The collection includes a holding of about 3,500 historical menus, acquired recently and intended for display. Anyone who has never worked with this material underestimates its value. A menu is a dated, signed, often illustrated document that records what was served, to whom, on what occasion and in what order: it is hard proof of a meal, while a recipe book is only its possibility. Through menus you reconstruct prices, real seasonality, fashions, the language of gastronomy, the passage from French to Italian on hotel menus. Ask if any piece from the holding is visible on the day of your visit.

The Online Guide and the Catalog Cards

The museum offers a reading path on its website, divided into two sections: the guide to the exhibition of kitchen tools, organized by display case, and the guide to the exhibition of the old books, organized by title. Each card contains the bibliological and bibliographic description of the work, with recipes and information drawn from the texts. Access to the complete cards requires a free registration. It is material worth reading even at home, and it effectively doubles the visit: first to prepare for it, then to reread what you have seen.

Roman Cooking Told Seriously Inside the Garum

Anyone arriving in Rome hears the same refrain everywhere about the four first courses and the fifth quarter, as if the cooking of this city were a catechism of six dishes. The museum’s library allows a different discussion, because it keeps the documents on which that discussion can be based. One example above all: La cucina romana by Ada Boni, 1929 edition, on display. Ada Boni is the same author as Il Talismano della felicità, a Roman, the editor of a cooking magazine. Her book on the city’s cooking is a contribution of study, declared as such from the subtitle, and it is one of the first serious attempts to put in writing a repertoire that until then lived only in osterie and homes.

Supplì: Five Documents, One True Story

Take the supplì, the quintessential Roman street food, and see what happens when instead of telling anecdotes you read the sources. The name comes from the French en surprise, for the surprise found when you break the croquette. The first printed attestation appears in 1755, in a comedy by Iacopo Angelo Nelli, where a character names the surprise among the dishes served at table. Then comes Giuseppe Gioachino Belli: in 1831, in the sonnet Er Papa, he uses the masculine form zuppriso comparing the shape of the supplì to the papal tiara. In 1838, in the Canterina de la valle, he uses the feminine form supprisa as a term of comparison for a body build. In 1846 Tommaso Azzocchi, in his Vocabolario domestico, records surprisa as a Roman dialect entry and defines it as a fried rice croquette stuffed with minced meat, mushrooms, peas and tomato sauce.

The recipes follow the same curve. Between 1832 and 1834 Vincenzo Agnoletti publishes the rice surprise, balls as big as an egg, stuffed with a cooked mixture and fried until golden. At the beginning of the 1900s Adolfo Giaquinto offers several variants, with mozzarella, with meat, with mushrooms. At the end of the 1920s Ada Boni fixes the supplì alla romana in the form we consider canonical, with the string of mozzarella that stretches at the bite and that gave the dish the nickname everyone knows. Five documents in a century and a half, and the story of a dish stops being folklore and becomes history. This is why a museum like this is worth more to Rome than 10 new typical restaurants.

The Method: How to Take Apart a Gastronomic Legend

The museum also publishes an exemplary case of source verification, that of pesto. The first printed recipe for Genoese pesto is found in the Cuciniera genovese of Giovanni Battista Ratto, first edition 1863, with garlic, basil, and in its absence marjoram and parsley, Dutch cheese and grated Parmesan. The authorship attributed to Emanuele Rossi rests on an 1852 edition that does not appear to have existed: Rossi’s first edition is from 1865, two years after Ratto, and the text of the recipe is copied. Basil, besides, appears in printed recipes only from 1549, with Cristoforo da Messisbugo. Bring this method to any Roman dish and you will see half the certainties circulating on tourist menus fall.

Ortensio Lando and the First Gastronomic Guide of Italy

Among the pieces the museum tells with pride is the Commentario de le piu notabili et mostruose cose d’Italia by Ortensio Lando, 1550 edition printed in Venice by Andrea Arrivabene, coming from the dispersal of the Bon collection. It is built as a dialogue between an Aramean traveler and an Italian innkeeper, and on leaves four to seven it lists the specialties of the Italian regions, for example the maccheroni of Sicily, whose name, he writes, would derive from beatify. It is the first food and wine travel guide written for Italy: in 1550 there was already the awareness that this country is eaten differently every 100 kilometers.

Events, Gastro-Historical Dinners and Courses at the Garum

The museum does not live only on visits. The program includes guided visits of the BiblioMuseo paired with a historical aperitivo served around the room, with finger food that reconstructs recipes drawn from the printed sources of the collection, and gastro-historical dinners built to measure for private, public or corporate events, with menus that cross five centuries of the history of taste, from Maestro Martino of the 1400s to Artusi. The calendar also includes seasonal appointments tied to the valley of the Circus Maximus. The spaces of the building also work as a venue for events and concerts, which explains why the museum, on certain dates, cannot be visited.

Why a Historical Dinner Is Not a Costume Reenactment

Many historical dinners are done badly, with the stage servant in a tunic and the modern sauce passed off as ancient. The criterion for telling if a proposal is serious is simple: ask from which book and which edition each dish comes. If the answer is precise, you are in good hands. If the answer is generic, you are paying for a disguise. A museum that has in house the Scappi of 1570 and the Latini of 1692 does not need to invent anything, and this is the competitive advantage of the formula.

Courses, Schools and Research

The founder comes from the world of professional training: the Etoile Academy, opened in Chioggia in 1984 as a center for advanced training and expanded in 2010 with a campus in Tuscania dedicated to haute cuisine, trained over 20,000 professionals before it closed in 2022. The library was born from that path, and it remains a study tool: scholars can consult the materials by appointment. If you are a teacher, a doctoral student or a restaurant professional, write explaining what you are looking for: a private collection reasons about content, not about forms.

With Children at Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

The honest answer is that it depends on age and on the kind of visit. The floor of tools works very well with children from six years up: the objects are recognizable, machines with cranks, molds with animal figures, a coal stove of 1880 that looks like it came out of an illustrated book, the kitchen game of 1898 that puts them in front of a toy from 128 years ago. The floor of books, by contrast, requires reading and patience: under 10 years old it bores. The strategy I recommend is to split the time, a good half hour downstairs and a quick pass upstairs, and turn the cases into a treasure hunt: find the object that was used to make butter, find the one for ice, find the animal hidden among the terrines. There are no tactile routes or permanent workshops for children, so the adults do the work.

Accessibility: What You Need to Ask First

The museum occupies two floors of a historic building and the layout of the rooms is that of an old building, with vertical connections between the street floor and the upper floor. Anyone with mobility problems, anyone traveling with a wheelchair or a bulky stroller must ask at the time of booking which rooms can be reached on the day of the visit and which entrance is best to use. It also applies to large groups: the spaces are those of a house, not of a state museum, and 20 people together in front of a case do not fit. The street in front of the door, by contrast, is flat and without steps, and the sidewalks along the Circus Maximus are walkable.

What Is Around the Garum Within 10 Minutes on Foot

The location is one of the best reasons to organize the visit: around the museum is one of the densest stretches of ancient Rome and you do not need to take any transportation. In front of the door opens the valley of the Circus Maximus, and overhead looms the Palatine with the substructures of the imperial palaces. In five minutes toward the Tiber you reach the Forum Boarium with the two Republican temples and the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, where the Mouth of Truth is set into the portico. Climbing the other slope, 10 minutes of ramp lead to the Orange Garden and the Basilica of Santa Sabina, with its wooden doors of the 5th century. In the opposite direction, 15 minutes of walking along Via di San Gregorio lead to the Colosseum, and the same to the south to the Baths of Caracalla.

Where to Eat After the Museum, Without Falling Into the Trap

The advice is counterintuitive: do not stop to eat within 200 meters of the Circus Maximus. It is a tourist transit zone with very few residents, and the average quality suffers. Walk 15 minutes more and go down toward the Nuovo Mercato Testaccio, or toward the district told by the Museo Diffuso del Rione Testaccio: there Roman cooking is an everyday fact and not a show. After seeing Scappi and Artusi in the case, sitting down in a neighborhood trattoria has a different flavor.

A Curiosity About Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

The real curiosity concerns the name, and almost nobody catches it. A museum that collects mostly books and tools of the modern age, from the 1500s to the 1900s, is named after a product of Roman antiquity that almost never appears in those books. It is a choice of poetics, not of chronology: it declares that cooking is a continuous chain and that the fermented fish sauce of the Romans and the colatura di alici that you buy today at the supermarket are the same object separated by 20 centuries. But there is more. Garum was the industrial product par excellence of the ancient world: standardized, bottled in branded amphorae, exported all over the Mediterranean, sold with recognizable brands and declared price ranges. Garum sociorum, the superior quality that came from the Iberian peninsula, could cost as much as a perfume. A museum that displays industrial chocolate molds, Appert’s tins and commercial cookbooks is therefore named, with a certain coherence, after the first branded food in European history.

The second part of the curiosity is even better: Apicius, the author to whom the De re coquinaria is attributed, uses garum in dozens of recipes and never explains how it is prepared. In the tenth book, the Halieus, there are the fish sauces, but the basic recipe is missing. The reason is simple and for that reason fascinating: nobody made it at home. It was bought. The silence of Apicius is indirect proof of the existence of a mature food market, with producers, distributors and urban consumers, in an age we imagine made of peasant self-production. In front of the museum’s sign, this is the story to tell first to whoever is with you.

Something Nobody Tells You About Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

That in here there is a shelf that no tourist guide mentions and that is the most instructive of all: the one with the books of autarky. On display are Le massaie contro le sanzioni by Lidia Morelli, 1935, the Alimentazione antisanzionista with its practical recipe book, 1936, and the manual by Federico Clementi on raising the egg-laying hen in the city, also 1935. These are the months in which the League of Nations imposed economic sanctions on Italy after the aggression against Ethiopia, and the regime responded by turning home cooking into a front: replacing imported products, multiplying substitutes, raising poultry on the terraces of the new neighborhoods. In the same sequence appear the recipe book of the Cuciniere militare of 1929 and the Genepesca recipe book of 1937, which pushed Atlantic fish toward Italian tables.

Nobody tells it because it is not postcard material, and for exactly that reason it is the main attraction. Many of the habits we consider Italian tradition today were born there: the massive use of certain substitutes, the fortune of some preserves, even the rhetoric of the poor dish as a virtue. A museum that displays these books next to the court treatises of the 1500s performs an honest cultural operation, because it shows cooking as a mirror of politics and economics, not as a repertoire of unchanging recipes. There is also a second practical fact that nobody tells you: the visit is free, and the free admission is not a temporary promotion but the formula chosen by the collection. You pay the price in organization, that is, by calling first and adapting to the calendar.

The Advice I Give You for Visiting Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

Call. It seems obvious and yet it is the point on which most visits are ruined: here you do not arrive at random, you set an appointment at the contacts given on the official website, and it is best to do it a few days ahead, because the building also hosts events and certain dates are taken. When you call, ask two precise questions: if the visit will be guided and if the historical menus are visible. They completely change the value of the morning.

Second piece of advice, on the order of the route. The natural sequence leads first to the objects and then to the books, but if you have less than an hour do the opposite: go straight up to the floor of books, look at the Scappi of 1570, the Platina of 1517, the Artusi of 1891, the Latini of 1692, and then go down to find the corresponding objects in the cases. The museum becomes a question-and-answer route instead of two parallel collections. Third: before leaving, read the list of volumes on show published by the museum, choose three titles and concentrate on those. 127 books all read the same way leave nothing, three books looked at seriously stay with you for years.

Fourth, and I say it as a professional: bring a notebook, not just your phone. The captions are dense with dates and titles, and the photograph of a caption is never reread. Fifth, on the season: the valley of the Circus Maximus in summer is an oven without shade, and the stretch of street up to the door in July, at two in the afternoon, is punishing. Better early morning or the last hours of the afternoon. Sixth, if you have a professional interest, declare it when you book: the difference between a generic visit and a targeted one, in a private collection, is made by the question you ask.

Another Well-Known Fact, Yet Rarely Cited

That the fork, an object we take for granted, took 800 years to become normal, and that one of its first known depictions appears in a book kept right in this library, the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi of 1570. The history of the tool is one of the most beautiful in European material culture. In 1077 St. Peter Damian tells with indignation of the use made of it by Theodora, doge’s wife of Venice and Byzantine princess, wife of Doge Domenico Selvo: a little two-pronged gold fork handled in a fussy way, which the saint judged a sign of arrogance. In 1209 the Pala d’Oro of San Marco depicts forks in the scene of the Last Supper. Innocent III, the pope Lotario da Segni, condemns them as vanity. In the 1300s Franco Sacchetti, in the Trecentonovelle, documents the use of the fork in a tavern in the tale of Noddo d’Andrea. The inventories of Lorenzo de’ Medici record 56 of them. Catherine de’ Medici brings it to France in the 1500s and teaches it at the court of Henry III.

The point that almost nobody cites is the reason for the resistance: the fork was for a long time perceived as a morally suspect object, because it puts a tool between the hand of God and the food, and because, according to an explanation that entered tradition, its shape recalled the devil’s pitchfork. The battle was not fought on hygiene, it was fought on theology and etiquette. To anyone who thinks things in the kitchen change quickly, the Scappi case answers with that page: 800 years to accept two prongs.

The Right Photo to Take at Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

The photograph that is worth the trip is not inside the cases, it is outside. Cross Via dei Cerchi, stand on the sidewalk that runs along the valley of the circus and frame the Baroque front with the hand with its index finger raised, keeping in the frame also a piece of the monastery wall and the greenery in the foreground. You need a fairly wide lens, a 24 or 28 on full frame, and above all you need the right hour: the facade faces southwest, so it gets the good light in the late afternoon, when the raking sun accentuates its moldings and the hand stands out against the sky. In the morning it stays in shadow and the result is flat. In summer, around 19:30, the wall turns orange and the silhouette of the index finger can be read from 100 meters.

The second shot, for anyone looking for something less postcard: the detail of the hand taken from below with a modest telephoto lens, isolating it against the sky, without context. It becomes an ambiguous, almost surreal image, and it works very well if you pair it with a photograph of the museum’s objects. Inside, the best subject is the row of chocolate molds: repeated forms, metal, reflections. The cases reflect a lot, so put the lens almost against the glass and shoot diagonally to eliminate the worst reflections. Flash is useless and in the rooms with the old books it is in any case rude, as well as a potential danger to the paper and the bindings: always ask before shooting in the room of volumes. Last piece of advice, not very photographic and very practical: the best framing of the whole, building and circus together, is obtained by climbing 100 meters toward the Palatine and shooting from above, but to do it you need tickets for the archaeological area, so weigh if it is worth it.

Some Important Events That Happened Here in History

Few streets in Rome have accumulated so many layers on a handkerchief of land. Legend places the Lupercale here below, the cave at the foot of the Palatine where Faustulus supposedly found Romulus and Remus and where the she-wolf supposedly nursed them. In January 2007 the announcement of the discovery of a cavity 15 meters deep under the House of Augustus, nine meters high and with a vault of mosaics, shells and a white eagle, reopened the question, with part of the scholars favoring the identification and part convinced it was a nymphaeum. In the first decades of the 4th century, perhaps between 325 and 326, the basilica of Sant’Anastasia is built next door, whose titulus appears in the acts of the synod of 499. The complex then passes to the Olivetans, the Benedictine congregation that is still its owner.

Around 1587 Sixtus V opens the street in its present form to ease the transport of the two obelisks removed from the Circus Maximus, the same ones the pope re-erected elsewhere in his plan of urban reorganization. In the 1600s the front in the form of a theatrical wing is built that served as access toward the Farnese Gardens, and the marble hand from the medieval church of Santa Maria de Manu is moved to the facade. In 1636 Urban VIII has the nearby Sant’Anastasia restored, and it takes on its present appearance. In 1853 the street changes face again: Rome’s first gas plant settles here, that of the Anglo-Roman company, which lights the city until 1910. In 1939 the church of Santa Maria de Manu is demolished and its apse remains visible. On August 6, 2021 the building opens its doors to the BiblioMuseo: after 17 centuries of churches, monasteries, princely gardens and gasometers, this address becomes the place where the written memory of Italian cooking is kept.

Who Has Passed Through Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

The building and its block have seen pass, in order, popes, monks, princes and engineers. Sant’Anastasia, which occupies the flank of the complex, was restored by a documented sequence of pontiffs: Damasus I in the 4th century, Leo III between the 8th and 9th, then Urban VIII Barberini in 1636, Pius VII and Pius IX in the 1800s. The Farnese, with their Gardens on the Palatine, made the slope above the street one of the most celebrated gardens in Europe, and the 1600s front with the hand was born as the monumental threshold of that world. The Olivetans, present for centuries, are still the owners of the property. In the 1800s came the technicians of the Anglo-Roman gas company, who set up the city’s first works here: between the monks and the Victorian engineers runs a leap in tone that sums up the history of Rome better than many handbooks.

Inside the museum, instead, who has passed through can be read on the shelves. Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, prefect of the Vatican Library. Bartolomeo Scappi, secret cook of Pius V, who truly cooked in the Vatican and who in his book described the kitchen of a conclave. Cristoforo da Messisbugo from the Este court. Antonio Latini, steward in Naples. Marie Antoine Carême, who worked for Talleyrand and for the courts of Europe. Auguste Escoffier, who with César Ritz invented the modern hotel. Pellegrino Artusi, a merchant from Romagna who became by chance the cooking teacher of the Italians. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1932 proposed abolishing pastasciutta. Ada Boni, who in 1929 put Roman cooking in writing. And of course Rossano Boscolo, born in Chioggia in 1956, who built this collection in 40 years and brought it here in 2021. A museum of books is a place crowded with people who were never physically there and who nonetheless inhabit it entirely.

When to Go to the Garum and When to Avoid It

The best season is the in-between one: April and May, or October, when the valley of the Circus Maximus is green and walkable and the light on the Baroque front is excellent in the afternoon. July and August, in the middle hours, are to be avoided: the stretch of street has no shade and the heat reflected by the walls is serious. Watch out too for the evenings of concerts in the valley of the circus: when there is a big event the area is fenced off, traffic is diverted and pedestrian access is complicated, and the museum itself might have the building taken. Those who visit in winter find the best condition for the library: quiet rooms, few people, all the time to read the captions.

A note on the day of the week. Since visits are by appointment, the concept of a closing day does not work as elsewhere: there is no Monday closing of the civic museums, there is agreed availability. This means you can organize the visit even on a day when half of museum Rome is closed, and it is an advantage few exploit. If you are building a Roman day, the suggestion is to put it early in the morning and continue with the Aventine, or in the late afternoon and close with the sunset from the Orange Garden.

How Much It Costs to Visit Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

Zero. Entry to the BiblioMuseo is free, no ticket, no reduced rates and no cards. The paid activities are the extras: guided visits paired with the historical aperitivo, gastro-historical dinners, private events, for which the quote is agreed directly with the museum. In a city where a private collection of this level would be put on the price list without hesitation, the choice of free admission deserves emphasis. For those building a low-cost itinerary, the natural pairing is with the page on free museums in Rome, which explains how free admission works in the city’s civic and state museums.

Quick Questions About Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine

Where is Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine?

At Via dei Cerchi 87, postal code 00186, in the Ripa district, along the side of the Circus Maximus facing the Palatine, a few meters from the intersection with Via di San Teodoro and next to the basilica of Sant’Anastasia al Palatino.

How much is a ticket to the Garum?

Nothing: entry to the BiblioMuseo is free. There is no ticket office and no full or reduced fares. Only the special activities are paid, such as guided visits with historical aperitivo and gastro-historical dinners, whose cost is agreed with the museum.

Do you need to book to visit Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine?

Yes. The visit is by appointment, to be set by calling the number given by the museum, +39 391 3846470, or by writing to info@museodellacucina.com. Extraordinary weekend openings are announced on the official website.

What are the Garum’s opening hours?

There is no continuous schedule every day: the museum opens by appointment and for the openings announced case by case, which as a rule cover the daytime until the evening. Before leaving it is always best to agree on the day and time.

How long does the visit to Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine take?

An hour and a half for a complete visit of the two floors. Two hours or more if you stop to read the cards of the 127 volumes on display. For a study consultation you need half a day and a dedicated appointment.

Is the museum suitable for children?

The floor of tools works well from six years up, with molds, machines, the coal stove of 1880 and the kitchen game for children produced in Ravensburg in 1898. The floor of books requires more patience and under 10 years old it interests them little. There are no permanent workshops for children.

Can you take photographs inside the Garum?

For the rooms and the cases, ask the staff who accompany you for confirmation, and in the room of the old books avoid flash in any case, since it damages paper and bindings. The best photograph, anyway, is the one of the Baroque front with the hand seen from the street.

What is the garum that gives the museum its name?

A liquid sauce obtained by fermenting fish innards and small fish under salt in the sun. The Romans used it as a basic seasoning. The liquid separated during fermentation was the liquamen, the solid residue the allec, the brine the muria. Garum sociorum, the most prized quality, came from Spain and cost as much as a perfume.

How many books does the Garum library hold?

The collection declared by the collector is around 3,500 volumes, with about 2,000 first editions, plus a holding of about 3,500 historical menus. On permanent display are 127 titles, whose list is published on the museum’s website.

What are the most important books on display at Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine?

The De honesta voluptate of Platina in the 1517 edition, the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi of 1570, the Libro novo of Cristoforo da Messisbugo of 1552, Lo scalco alla moderna of Antonio Latini of 1692, Le Cuisinier François of La Varenne of 1658, the Physiologie du goût of Brillat-Savarin of 1826, the first edition of Artusi of 1891, Le Guide Culinaire of Escoffier of 1903 and La cucina futurista of Marinetti of 1932.

How many objects are in the museum?

The declared collection of tools is about 4,000 pieces, of which around a thousand are on display, distributed in the thematic cases of the lower floor: speculoos, molds for sweets, molds for chocolate, kitchen miscellany, bread and pasta, ice cream and dairy making, pastry making, foie gras terrines.

Is the Garum accessible to people with mobility disabilities?

The museum occupies two floors of a historic building, with vertical connections between the street floor and the upper one. Anyone who uses a wheelchair, or travels with a bulky stroller, must ask at the time of booking which rooms can be reached. The street in front of the door is flat and without steps.

How do you get to the Garum by public transportation?

The most convenient stop is Circo Massimo, on metro line B, from which it is a five-minute walk along the valley of the circus. The surface lines serving the area pass along Via del Circo Massimo and Viale Aventino. It is best to check the updated routes on the city’s public transit app, because they change with construction work and events.

Can you walk there from the Colosseum?

Yes, in about 10 minutes, going down Via di San Gregorio and turning right at the Circus Maximus. From the Bocca della Verità it takes seven minutes, from the Orange Garden about 10 downhill.

Is there a coat check or luggage storage at the Garum?

It is not a museum with large-scale services: do not count on a coat check, luggage storage or an in-house café. Anyone arriving with suitcases or bulky backpacks should reckon with the spaces of a historic building and mention it when booking.

Is there a line to get in?

No. Since visits are by appointment, there are no lines. The flip side is that without an appointment you do not get in: anyone who shows up at the door hoping to find it open risks turning back.

What is the difference between Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine and the other museums in the area?

The archaeological museums of the Palatine and the Forum tell the architecture and politics of antiquity. Here the material culture of food is told from the 1500s to today, with books and tools. It is a thematic museum, not an archaeological site, and it should be visited with that expectation: the substance is in the texts and the everyday objects, not in the marbles.

Can you consult the old books?

Consultation for research is possible by appointment, with a reason given for the request. On display the volumes are in cases. For each one there is an online catalog card with a bibliological description, recipes and information drawn from the work, accessible after a free registration.

Does the Garum organize dinners and events?

Yes. The program includes guided visits paired with a historical aperitivo with finger food reconstructed from the printed sources, and gastro-historical dinners made to measure for private individuals and companies, with menus covering five centuries, from Maestro Martino of the 1400s to Artusi. The spaces of the building also host events and concerts.

Who founded Garum, Library and Museum of Cuisine?

Rossano Boscolo, a cook and pastry chef born in Chioggia in 1956, founder of the Etoile Academy and collector of old gastronomy texts. The museum opened on August 6, 2021 in a building of the Olivetan fathers.

How far ahead should you book?

A few days, and more if you are a group or aiming for a weekend. The building hosts events and the dates fill up: anyone who calls a week ahead almost always finds a solution.

Is it a good visit in the rain?

Very good. It is an indoor museum on two floors, the route is short and sheltered, and the library with rain outside is one of the most pleasant places in the center of Rome. The only uncovered stretch is the one from the metro to the door.

Is the museum free for groups too?

Entry stays free, but groups must be arranged in advance: the spaces are those of a historic building and cannot hold large parties at the same time. For structured guided visits and for the formulas with aperitivo or dinner a quote is agreed.

What is the one piece you absolutely must see at the Garum?

If I had to choose just one, the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi of 1570: a thousand recipes, the engraved plates of kitchen tools and what is indicated as the first known depiction of a fork. As a second piece, the early medieval grain millstone in the bread and pasta case.

Is it worth going if I am not a cooking enthusiast?

Yes, if you are interested in social history. This museum tells economics, religion, medicine, industry and propaganda through food. Anyone who arrives expecting a museum of recipes leaves with a lesson in European history.

One last thing. Rome is full of private collections that open with enthusiasm and close after two seasons, because nobody visits them and nobody tells their story. This one deserves the opposite: call, set the appointment, go with an hour and a half free and a clear head. Look at the Scappi and then look at the monastic refectory bowls: between those two objects, a court book and an undecorated bowl, lies the whole history of how we learned to eat. And then go out, cross the street and sit for five minutes on the grass of the Circus Maximus, which is the best way to let what you have seen settle.

Article written by the TourLeaderPro editorial team, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

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