Tourists learn - and taste - at Italy's gelato museum

Italy's la dolce vita just got a little sweeter, thanks to the recent opening of a free museum near Bologna that chronicles the evolution of Italian ice cream and offers tourists the chance to taste and create their own frozen treats.

An hour-long guided tour at the Gelato Museum Carpigiani, about seven miles outside Bologna, takes visitors from an 11th-century Arab pomegranate sorbet recipe to the invention of Italian gelato five centuries later later by Cosimo Ruggieri, alchemist and astrologer at Florence's House of Medici. Video interviews and photo galleries chart the dessert's increasing popularity and democratization in the 20th century.

In the tasting area — where instructors make modern versions of strawberry and raspberry sorbet recipes from 1822 and coffee sorbet first formulated in 1854 — visitors can sample several types of gelato for about $4; a short hands-on lesson costs about $13 and an intensive, four-hour session in gelato making, production and tasting costs about $60.

And, if all that learning has left you hungry for more, Slow Travel offers suggestions for five top-notch gelaterias in Bologna. But don't try slurping a cup on Rome's Spanish Steps: As Skift.com reports, a new Roman city ordinance prohibits tourists from eating pizza, sandwiches, panini or any other snacks around many of the monuments and architectural treasures in the Eternal City's historic center; fines range from about $32 to nearly $650.