Italy Flavours Fair

A taste of Italy in a single park

The Italy Flavours Fair is the major food and wine festival that brings Villa Torlonia to life every late summer, in the heart of the Frascati municipality, near Rome. The concept behind it is both simple and ambitious: to gather the most iconic dishes and wines from all twenty Italian regions in one place, allowing visitors to traverse the peninsula in just a few hundred meters, moving from one stall to the next as if crossing regional borders.

Over a hundred regional specialties

The tasting trail brings together more than a hundred dishes, carefully selected to represent local cuisines in their most authentic form. Offerings range from canederli from Trentino-Alto Adige to truffle stringozzi from Umbria, from traditional Roman cacio e pepe to Sicilian cannoli, not to mention Neapolitan street-style pizza and Adriatic seafood delicacies. Each station is designed as a small gastronomic embassy, with tasting portions that encourage visitors to curate their own personal menu rather than settling for a single dish.

A hundred DOC and DOCG labels

The wine selection is not just a side note but one of the event's core pillars. The wine bars set up in the park offer around a hundred appellation labels, featuring the great names of the national scene—Barolo, Chianti, Primitivo, Nero d'Avola, Cannonau—alongside the local wine, Frascati, which has been the calling card of these Castelli Romani for centuries. Being in the region of origin makes comparing the local white wine with productions from the rest of Italy particularly natural.

Masterclasses, show cooking, and workshops

A packed calendar of events revolves around the tastings. Masterclasses led by sommeliers and food journalists delve into specific territories or appellations, sometimes featuring vertical tastings of multiple vintages. Show cooking sessions bring chefs and television personalities to the stage, where they prepare recipes live and share their origins and variations. There are also educational workshops for children, dedicated to activities like making arancini or exploring the science behind cooking, as well as evening entertainment and storytelling moments.

Frascati and the Castelli Romani

The choice of venue is no coincidence. Frascati is the gateway to the Castelli Romani, the hilly area southeast of Rome historically tied to wine and dining culture, where the tradition of the fraschetta—the popular tavern serving bulk wine with cold cuts and porchetta—has shaped the tastes of Romans on day trips for generations. Villa Torlonia, with its historic park and the Teatro delle Fontane, provides a monumental backdrop for all this, just a stone's throw from the town center. The event is held under the patronage of the Municipality of Frascati and is part of the Castelli Romani tourism promotion circuit in the Lazio region.

How to access

Admission to the park is free of charge. To taste dishes and wines, visitors purchase a rechargeable token card, with each token worth one euro, available on-site or via online pre-sale; some limited-capacity events, such as masterclasses and show cooking with special guests, require a dedicated participation fee.