Museo dell'Olivo

One of Italy's most thorough museums devoted to olive oil and its history

The Museo dell'Olivo in Oneglia is one of the better small museums in Liguria, funded and maintained by the Fratelli Carli olive oil company whose headquarters are next door. The collection covers olive cultivation and oil production from ancient Greece and Rome to the present — amphorae, millstones, pressing equipment, and a range of archaeological material showing how central olive oil was to every Mediterranean civilisation that preceded us. The section on historical pressing methods alone is worth the admission.

The museum is housed in a well-converted industrial building near the Oneglia port. Labels are in Italian and English. The shop at the end sells Carli oil at factory prices, which is the better souvenir from Imperia than most of the alternatives in the tourist shops. Open Tuesday to Sunday.

things to do museum sight
A story
The Fratelli Carli company that funds the Museo dell'Olivo is itself a notable story — founded in Oneglia in 1911, it became one of Italy's largest mail-order olive oil producers before mail order was considered marketing. For decades, Carli sold directly to Italian families by catalogue, bypassing the wholesale trade entirely, which is how a small Ligurian port town became a household name for olive oil across the country.