Artefact Frascati

At a glance

Type

Independent collection of industrial and food-production heritage

Subject

The technological history of breadmaking: machinery, technical knowledge, and the mechanisation of industrial work

Founded by

Omar Cirulli, from a personal technical archive

Address

Via Janari 4, 00044 Frascati (RM), Italy

Coordinates

41.8091° N, 12.6830° E

Overview

Frascati is known for wine and for the villas of the Castelli Romani. Artefact is neither. It is a small room in the historic centre holding machines that made bread, kept by the person who restored them, and open because a specialty coffee bar shares the same space and pays the rent.

The machines are not decoration. They are arranged to explain a technical argument: how mechanical power was generated, how it was distributed through a workshop, and how the work of kneading — done by hand, and in some places by foot — was progressively taken over by machinery. Only part of the collection is on display; the rest is in storage, waiting for a larger space.

What you see

The centrepiece is a complete mechanical transmission system dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, reconstructed here. It is the clearest object in the room, because it carries its own history of energy: water first, then steam, and finally an electric motor. One power source, distributed by shafts and belts to several machines at once — the arrangement that defined the workshop before every machine had a motor of its own.

Connected to it is a refining machine from the beginning of the twentieth century. Alongside stands an arm mixer of the same period, the machine that ended hand-kneading; the same mechanical principle later moved into chemical, pharmaceutical, paint and perfume production, which is how a bakery mixer ends up being a piece of general industrial history. From the early 1940s come two independently motorised electric mixers, an egg-beater and a planetary mixer — the last of these significant because its motion allows different tools to be swapped for different processes, a principle still used in industrial processing today.

Around the machines: early twentieth-century moulds, tinplate tools and hand equipment, the artisanal knowledge that went on working alongside the mechanised kind. And a restored Faema E61 from the 1960s, which belongs to a later technology and to the coffee side of the project.

The collection, photographed by Artefact

These photographs were taken and supplied by Omar Cirulli of Artefact Frascati, and are published with his permission.

Cultural significance

Industrial heritage is usually preserved at the scale of the factory, and small machinery tends to vanish — scrapped when a bakery closes, or sold as ornament. Artefact keeps a coherent set of it together, with the transmission system that makes the other objects legible. The argument the collection makes is that these machines changed how millions of people worked while still depending on craft knowledge, and that they can be read as evidence of a social change rather than as antiques.

Practical information

Opening hours

Monday 09:30–16:30 · Tuesday 09:30–18:30 · Wednesday 09:30–18:30 · Thursday 09:30–16:30 · Friday 09:30–18:30 · Saturday 09:30–18:30 · Sunday closed

Admission

The collection is in the coffee bar’s own space and can be seen during opening hours

Note

The space is small. Part of the collection is not on display

Getting there

Frascati is about twenty kilometres south-east of Rome. Trains run from Roma Termini to Frascati station in roughly half an hour, and the historic centre is a short walk uphill from there. By car, the via Tuscolana or the Roma–Fiuggi road.