Tavola Mediterranea

Tavola Mediterranea Tavola Mediterranea is the home of Roman culinary archaeology on the web. Now shipping bread nationwide on Goldbelly!

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I recently experienced the worst travel day of my life and, no, it didn’t involve United Airlines, so I suppose it could...
06/13/2026

I recently experienced the worst travel day of my life and, no, it didn’t involve United Airlines, so I suppose it could’ve been worse!

It started at Rome Fiumicino and rapidly escalated into what can only be described as Dante’s nine circles of Hell with passport control. “Abandon all hope, ye who fly here.” Delayed flights. Broken trains between terminals at Heathrow. Turbulence over London. Somewhere along the way, my suitcases decided they wanted to stay in Europe rather than come home with me.

By the time I spilled into Terminal 5, a complete hot mess, all I wanted was a decent book, a cup of tea, and a quiet corner. My mission? To find ‘Roman Empire by Train – A Travel Journal’, at WHSmith. No luck. 😭

Rather than adding “passenger outburst resulting in arrest” to my list of travel mishaps, I downloaded the Kindle edition and settled in for the flight home. The book itself (written by James McNally) was a delight, bringing back wonderful memories of the TV series and my time filming with Professor Alice Roberts in Turin, but the real surprise was the foreword, written by Alice herself. ☺️

Imagine my delight to discover that Alice had included a very kind mention of me following one of our catch-ups in London last year. In an instant, the delayed flights, broken trains, lost bags, bouncy planes, and bad travel hair simply melted away. 🥰

I’m incredibly fortunate and grateful, not only to have worked with Alice, but to count her as a friend. She is one of the great trailblazers of our field and an inspiration to women in archaeology, history, and academia everywhere.

Author. Academic. Broadcaster. Television presenter. Tireless advocate for archaeology and science. Honestly, I have no idea when she sleeps! Somehow she’s constantly raising the bar while making the rest of us wonder whether we’ve really had such a busy week after all. 😅

Alice shows us what passion, curiosity, conviction, kindness, and hard work can achieve. Thank you, Alice, for continuing to inspire so many of us to aim a little higher, dream a little bigger, and work a little harder. 💪❤️ 😃

There’s always that one kid in class. You know the one: they did their homework, read the assigned texts, went the extra...
06/11/2026

There’s always that one kid in class. You know the one: they did their homework, read the assigned texts, went the extra mile, and somehow got the best grades while the rest of us were lurking outside the punk rock doors of our high school smoking ci******es and making questionable life choices…

Well, at this year’s Old School Kitchen master class, we didn’t have one of those students… we had two!

A huge thank you to Megan and Karen for pursuing excellence and for caring so deeply about the ancient texts, art, and archaeology, asking not just “what did the Romans make?” but “what can we make using the evidence alone?”

Their recreation of Virgil’s and Pompeii’s ‘adorea liba’ absolutely knocked it out of the park. Good enough for the gods, but even better for the rest of us, because we got to eat them. 😋

This is experimental archaeology at its best, folks: curiosity, scholarship, collaboration, and a delicious reward. A+ to Megan and Karen. You can collect your Toys-R-Us gift cards after class. 😉 😊

One of the unexpected lessons from this year’s The Old School Kitchen – Culinaria Pompeiana master class was that the Ro...
06/06/2026

One of the unexpected lessons from this year’s The Old School Kitchen – Culinaria Pompeiana master class was that the Romans practised what we might call ‘zero-food waste’, not because it was fashionable but because food had value and famine was never far from memory.

During the class, we prepared Columella’s ‘defrutum’: a rich reduction of grape must flavoured with fennel and fenugreek. Rather than discarding the grape and herb pulp, Karen and Victoria followed the Roman mindset and transformed it into Cato’s grape must cakes the very next day. Nothing wasted. Everything given a second life.

This approach would have been familiar to any Roman farmer or cook. For the Romans, the use of so-called ‘food waste’ was not merely economy, it was survival. For example: Cato and Pliny describe preserving and drying fruit that would last through the year teaching us that every ingredient represented the labour of people, the productivity of the land, and the uncertainty of the next harvest. During our week in Pompeii, we tried to step into that ancient mindset, discovering that some of the most memorable dishes came not from extravagance, but from ingenuity and respect for the ingredients at hand.

These grape must cakes became one of the unexpected highlights of our Pompeian master class. More to follow!

06/06/2026

The late Slow Food founder gave us new hope

06/05/2026

😃

Our group made a bread offering at a Marian shrine up at the caldera of Mount Vesuvius. A beautiful location for a shrin...
06/04/2026

Our group made a bread offering at a Marian shrine up at the caldera of Mount Vesuvius. A beautiful location for a shrine, if you ask me, and a fitting place to make an offering too! Yes we offered taralli napoletani… This too is fitting, and beautiful. 🙏 💪 🥯 🌋

Modern Ercolano rises directly above the ancient city of Herculaneum, creating one of the most remarkable layers of hist...
06/03/2026

Modern Ercolano rises directly above the ancient city of Herculaneum, creating one of the most remarkable layers of history anywhere in the world. Beneath the streets, apartment buildings and churches of the modern town lie the extraordinarily preserved remains of the Roman city, entombed beneath 15–20 metres of volcanic material during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Yet what visitors see today is only part of the story:

Archaeologists estimate that roughly 75% of ancient Herculaneum remains buried beneath the modern town, leaving much of the city’s forum, temples, streets, and houses still hidden from view. In this photograph, the relationship is laid bare: the modern city in the foreground, ancient Herculaneum concealed below, and Vesuvius itself standing watch in the background: the very force that destroyed one city and, paradoxically, preserved most of it for nearly two millennia.

06/02/2026

Scenes from the Republic. ❤️ Viva La Repubblica! 🇮🇹

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