Wedged between the Circus Maximus and the Lupercal, where the city’s founders are said to have been suckled to health by a she-wolf, Rome’s new library and museum presents visitors with a culinary perspective on history.

Founded in February 2020 by pâtissier and educator Rossano Boscolo, Garum is hardly the first food museum on earth, yet there’s no other place like it.

Spread over two floors, visitors can enjoy the fruits of Boscolo’s four-decade journey spent collecting gastronomic artifacts.  On the first floor, one can find such culinary curiosities as 17th century ice cream molds, several of the world’s first gas ovens, and a play kitchen dating to 1898. On the second, an antique library showcases approximately 130 rare culinary texts, from a 1517 edition of Bartolomeo Sacchi’s De honesta voluptate—the first practical cookbook ever printed—to a 1932 first edition of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s radical, controversial Futurist Cookbook.  

Garum’s Director, Matteo Ghirighini, hopes that the museum will allow visitors of all kinds to immerse themselves in a more tangible, common history, through the collections themselves and by way of a series of ongoing tastings and lectures.  After all, if most of us come to Rome to enjoy some of the world’s best food, why not learn about it as well?