General

The books

The Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library houses over 8,500 books.

The books are organized into groups or sections, numbered 0 to 9. Section 0, for example, contains all the general reference tools.

This classification system allows you to search books available in the library by subject, facilitating the discovery of other books about the same topic.

It also allows you to explore the bookshelves easily and in total freedom.

Research tools

Like all the great public libraries, the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library has a large collection of general subject books. 

These books have been labeled 0 and include encyclopedias, dictionaries, bibliographies and guides – tools that help you at the beginning of your research.

However, unlike other libraries, all of our general books are related to gastronomy.

Our culinary encyclopedias allow you discover information about every element of a meal. The dictionaries are useful for looking up specific ingredients. 

The bibliographies are particularly useful to scholars who have to present information on food publications from throughout history.

A guide to the guides

One of the special parts of the library is our collection of Italian restaurant and wine guidebooks.  Year after year, the guides rank the best restaurants and provide information that allows any Italian food lover to build your own food and wine tours. 

You can also find guides to Italy’s incredible traditional foods.  In most libraries, only the most recent guides are kept on the shelves.

However, at the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library, the guides from years past and displayed alongside the current editions, giving you a historical perspective. Only here is it possible to consult the complete series of the mythic red Michelin Guide to Italy, Apollo buongustaio, or other annual publications. These books document the evolution of Italian gastronomy from the end of WWII to today.

Getting to know Italy and Italian products

Another important collection of books in the Library addresses the traditional foods and products of Italy.

In every city and region of Italy, you can find a local food culture as rich as its artistic patrimony. Our library houses a vast inventory of books about subjects as varied as bread, meat, salumi, cheese, vegetables and fruit, making it easy to search for the regional specialties or study how dishes change from one region to the next.

Section 0 is the entryway to the other sections that contain more specialized books and information.