Giulia Ferraro

I made garum for six months

Roman fish sauce in a bucket in Malmo, six months, 20 percent salt. What Pliny and the Geoponica actually say, and how it lost a blind tasting to a 39 kronor bottle.

Seneca was extremely rich

Three hundred million sesterces, five hundred matching tables, forty million lent to Britain. Taking the hypocrisy charge seriously instead of enjoying it.

Rust removal, five methods, one winner

I sheared a rusty belt guard into five coupons and gave each one a different treatment. Times, costs, mass loss, and what each did to the metal underneath.

Catullus 85 in eleven words

Fourteen words, eight of them verbs, not a single noun. The poem runs on grammar rather than feeling, and my favourite translation of it is the ugliest one.

Same flour, same oven, four hydrations

Four doughs, one sack of flour, one bake. 65, 72, 80 and 88 percent hydration measured properly. 72 won, and the wettest dough lost badly.

Pliny describes his villa and nobody can draw it

Epistulae 2.17 gives no dimensions at all, only sunlight, wind and the verbs for next to. Four centuries of reconstructions and not one of them holds.

Instrument Serif is doing something clever

I opened the font file first. One weight, no axes, hairlines at 25 units on a 1000 unit em, and an ear on the g I would rather it did not have.