Olive Museum

The Olive Museum you’re about to enter is not a generic gallery of fruit and oil. It is a private, multimedia museum born inside the Fratelli Carli complex in Imperia, dedicated to the olive tree and its oil, with a precise lineage tied to the Carli family. The opening moment is anchored in a named individual: Carlo Carli, the Cavaliere del Lavaro, whose passion for the olive tree built the gallery as a tribute to years of collecting and study.

The museum was inaugurated in May 1992, inside the old Fratelli Carli headquarters, a choice that linked the collection to the very place that shapes Imperia’s olive story. The architectural and curatorial frame is simple in its logic but wide in its reach:18 rooms, each devoted to a specific theme or moment in the olive’s story. As you descend from Sala 1, the history of the olive unfolds through a narrated voice and a trove of artifacts; among the most striking is the fossilized trunk section of a wild olive tree dating back around 12 million years.

This concrete specimen is not decoration; it anchors a long arc—from deep geological roots to centuries of cultivation and commerce.