Antonio Carluccio’s personal archive will go on display in Oxford later this month.

The celebrity chef, who brought Italian cooking to UK TV screens in the 1990s, moved to London in 1975 to work as a wine merchant but soon got noticed for his culinary flair. His first cookery book was published in 1986 and he opened his first Carluccio’s deli and restaurant five years later.

His personal archive, boasting everything from photographs of him as a child through to manuscript recipes, is held by Oxford Brookes University’s library.

A slice of the enormous collection of recipes and letters will go on display at the Headington university when Brookes’ special collections and archive reading room reopens to the public on September 13.

Helen Workman, director of learning resources at Oxford Brookes, told The Observer that the cook’s ‘foraging sticks’ – whittled by Carluccio himself – were among the librarians’ favourite items in the archive.

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