Italian Cured Fish 2025: Bottarga, Baccalà and the Preserved Sea

How the Romans used fermented fish sauce in every dish — and why it disappeared from Italian cooking for 1,500 years before returning as colatura

The Roman garum (the fermented fish sauce produced in massive quantities throughout the Roman Empire — the principal flavoring ingredient in Roman cooking, used in every context from bread seasoning to wine flavoring to meat marinades in a way that no single contemporary Western condiment approximates) was produced in purpose-built fish fermentation facilities (the cetariae — the fish salting factories, several identified archaeologically at Pompeii, along the Campanian coast, and throughout the Mediterranean provinces) from the 3rd century BC through the 4th century AD. The scale: the Pompeii cetaria at Via dell'Abbondanza is the most visited Roman fish factory in the world by archaeological tourists who don't know they're in a fish factory — the 20 large storage vats (dolia) sunk into the floor of what appears to be a wine bar are the fermentation vessels of one of the most productive garum facilities in the western Mediterranean. The disappearance: the collapse of the Roman trade network (which distributed garum from the large Mediterranean production centers to every corner of the Empire) and the post-Roman subsistence economy (which could not support the investment required for large-scale fish fermentation) eliminated the garum tradition from Italian cooking by approximately 600 AD. The Cetara reemergence: the specific Cetara tradition of colatura (documented in medieval Cistercian monastery records from the 13th century — the monks apparently developed or maintained the fermentation technique from Roman precedents) represents the only documented continuous thread from the Roman garum tradition to the contemporary Italian kitchen.