There are sentences that somehow contain an entire Italian summer: Andiamo a prendere un gelato?
It doesn’t really matter if you have already had dessert. It doesn’t matter if it’s late. It doesn’t even matter if you particularly wanted gelato five minutes earlier.
Because gelato, in Italy, is rarely just about wanting something sweet. Fa parte di un rituale della giornata.
And perhaps my favorite version of it begins after dinner.
The table has been cleared, the heat of the day has finally softened, the windows are open, and technically the evening could be over. And then someone says, dai prendiamo un gelato!
And suddenly everyone is putting their shoes back on.
You walk to your favorite gelateria, order your cone, and then you keep walking. Con calma. No destination, really. Maybe through the piazza, maybe along the lungomare, maybe just around the same streets you have walked a thousand times before.
Gelato in one hand. Una chiacchierata, l’aria ancora un po’ calda. Children still awake far too late. Tables outside still full. That particular sound of an Italian town on a summer night when nobody seems quite ready to go home.
I think that might be my favorite part.
Not even the gelato. La passeggiata.
The beautiful thing about gelato is that it belongs almost anywhere in the day.
There is the afternoon gelato, la merenda, preferably when you have been at the beach all day and salt is still drying on your skin.
There is the after-dinner gelato. Il perfetto dopocena.
There is the completely unnecessary gelato you get simply because you passed a good gelateria and, well… what were you supposed to do?
And then there is the gelato that becomes lunch. Yes, I have done gelato for pranzo before.
A beautiful yogurt gelato with fresh fruit. Lemon. Peach. Strawberry. Melon. Something light and fresh on one of those summer days when the idea of sitting down to an actual meal feels almost excessive.
But there is another thing I love about Italian gelato. La stagionalita’, in fact, you cannot always have the flavor you want.
And I love that.
Per esempio, one of my absolute favorite flavors is fico.
But fig gelato belongs to that very specific moment between August and September, when figs are everywhere in Italy—soft and heavy, their skins almost splitting open from the heat, so sweet they barely need anything else.
For a few weeks, fico appears in the gelateria. And then it disappears. You wait another year.
There is something so beautifully Italian about that.
We have become accustomed to expecting everything, everywhere, all the time. Strawberries in December. Tomatoes in February. Every flavor imaginable, twelve months a year.
But some things are better because you have to miss them.
Then autumn comes.
The air changes. Summer slowly disappears. And somewhere around November I start wanting marron glace’.
Chestnut (candied) gelato—deep, creamy, almost old-fashioned.
A completely different kind of pleasure.
And then there is zabaione. One of those flavors that immediately takes me somewhere else.
Egg yolks, sugar, Marsala. Rich, silky, unmistakably Italian.
My perfect combination has always been cioccolato fondente e zabaione with panna montata on top.
Perfetto.
And speaking of nostalgia…
Can we please talk about the gelateria in the ’90s?
Because going for gelato was once an entire production.
There were menus con fotografie and here were enormous glass cups arriving at the table looking like something between dessert and architecture.
Mangia e Bevi Gelato, fruit, syrups, whipped cream, everything piled together in one glorious glass.
The banana split.
The coppe covered in wafers, cherries, little decorations and quantities of panna that nobody seemed remotely concerned about.
And, of course, the spaghetti.
Vanilla gelato pushed through a press to look like spaghetti, strawberry sauce pretending to be tomato, something white grated over the top to resemble Parmigiano.
It made absolutely no sense. And it was semplicemente fantastico!
Those old fashioned coppe gelato deserve an entire story of their own.
Maybe one day.
Gelato has changed since then. In many ways, it has become much more serious.
The best gelatieri artigianali today are almost obsessive about ingredients and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Good milk. Seasonal fruit. Real pistacchio e nocciole. Less sugar. No unnecessary preservatives. Ingredients sourced from small producers, sometimes just a few kilometers away. We say kilometro zero.
There are gelatieri working directly with farmers, waiting for a particular fruit to ripen before making a flavor.
And then there are those pushing gelato somewhere completely unexpected.
Ricotta di pecora with honey and walnuts. Mascarpone. Parmigiano Reggiano.
Savory gelati paired with aged balsamic vinegar, vegetables, even meat.
Gelato has entered the kitchens of great chefs and become something sophisticated, gastronomic, occasionally surprising.
And I love that too.
But still…
Give me a warm evening in Italy.
Give me a gelateria with a small line outside.
Give me due gusti in a cone.
Give me fico when figs are actually in season.
Give me zabaione and dark chocolate with a completely unreasonable amount of fresh panna.
And then let me walk.
Because perhaps that is the part we sometimes forget when we try to recreate Italian food somewhere else.
You can find extraordinary ingredients.
You can learn the technique.
You can make a beautiful gelato almost anywhere in the world.
But how do you recreate everything around it?
And maybe that is why, no matter how many wonderful gelati I eat elsewhere, there will always be something about gelato in Italy that tastes different to me.
Because I’m not only tasting the gelato, e’ tutta l’atmosfera.
So when someone asks, “andiamo a prendere un gelato?”
the answer is really very simple.
Andiamo.
Ciao, Laura