Five Souvenirs Worth Bringing Home From Rome

Via Margutta is one of the most beautiful streets in Rome — a quiet, ivy-covered lane that has been home to artists, painters and sculptors since the Middle Ages. Federico Fellini lived here. Truman Capote and Igor Stravinsky both stayed on this street. The building at number 51 appeared in Roman Holiday. At number 53b, tucked behind a low door, is a workshop that has been doing the same thing since 1967: the Fiorentini family hand-engraves marble plaques, one by one, using traditional tools and techniques that have not changed in centuries.

Rome is built of marble. The Pantheon, the Colosseum, the floors of every great basilica in the city — all marble, much of it quarried from the same Italian mountains. Marble is the material of Rome the way stone is the material of a cathedral. La Bottega del Marmoraro makes that material personal. You choose your inscription — a Latin phrase, a Roman proverb, a name, a date, a line from a poem — write it down, hand it to the artisan, and return an hour or a day later to find it cut into the stone. A small custom plaque starts at around EUR15. It will last longer than anything else you bring home from any city.

The walls of the workshop are covered floor to ceiling with marble slabs already inscribed with phrases. Walking in, you are immediately surrounded by centuries of Roman thought rendered in stone. One plaque on the wall reads: La bellezza è ovunque, bisogna solo saper guardare — Beauty is everywhere, you just need to know how to look for it. That is, incidentally, an excellent description of the shop itself.

The Cirri family were hatters in Tuscany for generations before bringing their craft to Rome in 1936. Their workshop in the Prati district, a few streets from the Vatican, became the oldest hat atelier in the city — and the only one ever to receive the official recognition of Historical Shop of Rome. In 2003, Patrizia Fabri, a fashion designer and historian who had loved the workshop since she was seventeen, took over the business and renamed it Antica Manifattura Cappelli, to ensure neither the name nor the craft would disappear.

The workshop contains over two thousand wooden hat forms, some more than a century old, lining the walls like sculptures. The original oven for drying straw and felt still stands in the corner. Every hat is made on these wooden forms using entirely manual processes — steam, pressing by hand, shaping with tools worn smooth by decades of use. The result is something that could not be produced by a machine, a factory, or a brand. It is made to the measure of your head and the shape of your face, in whatever style and material you choose, in this room, by these hands.

The clientele across the decades gives a sense of the workshop's reputation. Patrizia has created hats for the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, the Berlin Opera House, the Monte Carlo Opera House. She has dressed Madonna and Lady Gaga. But she has also made hats for ordinary Romans who walk in off the street, as Patrizia herself once did at seventeen, and leave with something they will wear for the rest of their lives. A bespoke hat starts at around EUR150. It is the most personal souvenir on this list, and the hardest to find anywhere outside this city.

The Durante family came from Sant'Elena, a village in the mountains of Basilicata, where young men traditionally left to find work in the cities of Italy as travelling tradespeople — knife grinders, cobblers, craftsmen. The Durantes arrived in Rome and became knife grinders, then moved to shaving soaps and hair lotions, then to perfume. By the twentieth century they were among the most important perfume makers in the Eternal City. Four siblings — Giuseppe, Luciano, Maria and Felice — grew up in this world and took it over. But as the perfume market globalised and standardised, they felt, as they described it, manipulated and no longer free in their own work. In 1996 they left the mainstream and created Profumum Roma.

The house produces perfumes that are specifically, consciously Roman. Each fragrance takes its name and spirit from a place, a feeling, or a moment that belongs to the city — the air near a Roman fountain, the smell of incense in a basilica, the gardens of the Palatine Hill in summer. The concentrations are high, the ingredients carefully chosen, and the bottles simple and serious. These are not fragrances designed to appeal to the widest possible market. They are designed to express something true about one particular place.

The boutique near the Spanish Steps is one of the best perfume shopping experiences in Rome — knowledgeable, unhurried, and genuinely guided by the character of each fragrance rather than its price. Travel sizes of every perfume are available, making it possible to try widely before committing. A Profumum Roma perfume is the most portable, most durable, and most specifically Roman object you can bring home from the city.

In 1850, Agostino Moriondo opened a chocolate factory in Turin as supplier to the royal House of Savoy. His operation grew and he took on a partner — his cousin Francesco Gariglio — and together they built one of the most celebrated confectioneries in Italy. When unified Italy made Rome its capital in 1870, the Savoys followed. Naturally, they still needed their chocolate. Moriondo and Gariglio followed too, and opened their Roman branch a few streets from the Pantheon. The shop has been there ever since — the oldest chocolate shop in Rome, its recipes a continuous secret for over a century, passed by word of mouth from one chocolatier to the next.

The most remarkable detail of this transmission concerns the invention of the Baci Perugina — the famous Italian chocolate kisses now sold in every supermarket in the world. It was here, in this shop, that a Turin chocolatier named Carlo Enrico Cuniberti invented the stelle oro: gold-star pralines wrapped in gold foil, filled with gianduja cream. Perugina opened a boutique on Via Condotti, and their chocolatiers came regularly to Moriondo & Gariglio to buy products. They loved the stelle oro and, as the current owner puts it: "They copied them. At first, they weren't called Baci but 'cazzotti' — punches." The original, it seems, has always been here.

Today the shop is run by Attilio Proietti and his mother Piera, who has stood behind the counter for nearly sixty years. Everything is made in the laboratory behind the glass counter. Over a hundred types of handmade chocolates and sweets are offered, sold by weight — ganaches, pralines, caramels, fruit jellies, and the Lacrime d'Amore, tiny sugar-coated spheres with liquid centres found only here. Every autumn, the marrons glacés begin production: large chestnuts from Piedmont, hand-peeled by Piera on the floor surrounded by open boxes, candied slowly in syrup and sealed into glass jars. When they are gone, they are gone until next year.

Via del Governo Vecchio is one of the most beautiful streets in Rome — a long, narrow medieval lane running through the heart of the historic centre, lined with independent bookshops, vintage clothes, small trattorias and workshops. It is the kind of street that exists in Rome and almost nowhere else: neither tourist nor residential, but inhabited by craftspeople and dealers and people who have been there for generations. Manufactus is on this street, producing handmade leather journals, notebooks and stationery using traditional Italian bookbinding techniques.

The journals are made with vegetable-tanned Italian leather — full grain, aged naturally, gaining character with use — and hand-sewn paper in a range of weights and textures. The covers come in deep olive greens, aged browns, burgundies and blacks, all in natural leathers that develop a patina over years of handling. Each journal can be personalised with a name or initials stamped into the cover while you wait. The binding is Coptic stitch, an ancient method that allows the book to open completely flat — appropriate for a city built on ancient techniques.

Leather journals from Rome carry a particular weight. This city has been a destination for writers since Goethe arrived in 1786 and declared it had changed him completely. Keats died here. Byron wrote here. Henry James spent his most productive years in these streets. A journal bought in Rome, from a craftsman who made it by hand in a workshop on a medieval lane, becomes part of that inheritance in whatever small way you choose to use it.