Lavazza's New Coffee Museum Is Yet Another Reason to Visit Italy

Italy may be famous for its food, but no good Italian meal is complete without an after-dinner espresso. So while you’re eating your way through Italy, make time to stop at the new Museo Lavazza. As Travel + Leisure reports, the famous coffee company just opened up a new museum at its headquarters in Turin, offering a caffeinated tour through all things coffee.

The museum is part of a new corporate campus called Nuvola Lavazza, or “Lavazza Cloud,” which includes the company’s offices, an open piazza, and two restaurants. Designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a major museum design firm known for its work on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., the museum experience is an interactive tour through coffee’s past, present, and future.

The tour includes an interactive Lavazza coffee cup that visitors can use to save information they see in different exhibits. They can set it down at certain points throughout the museum to activate installations, save information about their visit, and share digital displays on social media. (You can see one of the cup-activated installations in this video.)

The exhibits cover everything from Lavazza’s founding story to its advertising through the years to the history of espresso machines (like the one Lavazza developed for International Space Station astronauts) to the basic science of coffee. According to Travel + Leisure, the company has an archive of 8500 or so documents related to coffee history, so there’s plenty to draw upon for new exhibits in the future. Naturally, the tour ends with a drink. You get a free classic coffee and a taste of something that’s a more creative take on the coffee theme, like a coffee cocktail.

Italian coffee culture is notoriously full of rituals and rules that aren’t always apparent to foreigners—one never drinks a milky coffee after breakfast, for instance—so while you’re visiting Italy, put down your pasta fork for a moment and get yourself a quick coffee education.

[h/t Travel + Leisure]

All images courtesy Lavazza unless otherwise noted