Rome Attractions

Venue: Museo della Pasta    When: Daily

In Rome, the capital of the homeland of golden pasta, check out the only museum in the world to be entirely devoted to this frugal yet endlessly variable Italian foodstuff.

Pasta is surely one of the most lasting and universal Italian contributions to world culture, and nowhere else will equip you better for a lifetime of gastronomical exploration in pastaland. Know your food and know yourself, for as everyone knows, you are what you eat.

Certainly, you'll have plenty of information to gather here: the everyday banality of a food that has become fodder is peeled away, exhibit after exhibit, until you realise just how amazing pasta really is. What makes it so fantastic, you may ask? It's easy to preserve, for one, and equally easy to transport and cook. Dried, it could be stored for months, without refrigeration or preservation.

A series of halls explore the evolution of the machinery of pasta production, from the earliest stone machines to modern industrial mass-production facilities. Other rooms cover the cultural evolution of pasta, showcasing documents dating back to 1154 which prove that it was produced and consumed on a large scale already by the end of the 12th century. Exhibits explore the relationship between pasta, theatre and the arts, with amongst other things a series of paintings by contemporary artists (Crista, Latella, Scaglione, Penél, Di Rocco).