A Short History

An old wish for something cold

The wish for something cold and sweet is older than the freezer. In many ancient lands, it is said, people carried snow and ice down from mountains and caves. With it they chilled honey or fruit juice. Cold was a luxury, and only a few could reach it.

In time the work went further than chilling. People began to shape the ice itself into something pleasant to eat. The story of gelato stands at the end of that long line of small improvements. No single genius invented it one day. Many places and many centuries raised it, a little at a time.

The journey of the word sorbetto

A clue survives inside the language. The Italian word that once named a frozen dessert, sorbetto, is said to go back to the Arabic sharbat, meaning a drink. The English word sherbet comes from the same root.

A culture of chilled sweet drinks crossed the Mediterranean to Sicily, and from there it spread up the Italian peninsula. The journey of the word was also the journey of a taste. Sicily is still known for its sorbetto and its granita. The memory of that island is alive in gelato today.

The Renaissance founders — and here the record thins

Now the story turns splendid. But most of what follows is tradition rather than documented history, and it is fair to say so first.

The most famous tale belongs to sixteenth-century Florence and Bernardo Buontalenti. He was an artist and an engineer. He is said to have made a creamy ice with milk and egg, for a Medici banquet. For this he is called the father of modern gelato. It is a fine story. Little firm record supports it, and another account of the same period names a different man as the founder.

A second famous tale belongs to Caterina de' Medici. She married into the French royal house in 1533. The story goes that she brought Florentine cooks and their ices to France. The marriage is fact. The ices are not. That part is now taken as a later invention.

Why are such stories told again and again? Probably because they are so appealing. One pleasure of history is to enjoy a tale while asking whether it is true. The tale and the record stay apart.

The day it belonged to everyone

Out of the mist of tradition, we reach firm ground. Paris, 1686. Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, a Sicilian, opened a café called Café Procope.

Until then, ice desserts were for kings and nobles. What Procopio did was to sell them widely, as a cup that anyone with money could buy. His café became a landmark of Paris, and ice desserts passed into the hands of people across Europe. From a luxury of the few to a pleasure of the many. That was a turning point in the history of taste.

What the machine changed

The other great turn came much later, in the twentieth century. Until then, making gelato meant chilling with ice and salt, and stirring by hand. It was heavy labor. Quality rested on the skill and the stamina of the maker.

In 1945, in Bologna, Carpigiani produced a machine that made gelato automatically. With the machine doing the freezing and the stirring, quality grew steady and volume grew larger. Gelato passed from the specialty of a few famous shops to an everyday pleasure found across a town. Gelato appeared on Japanese streets in the same way, once such machines and skills had reached the world. That was fairly recent.

The history is still running

From ancient snow, to a Sicilian word, to a Renaissance legend. Then to a café in Paris, and a machine in Bologna. The history of gelato was never one invention. It was a long relay, with many places and many hands each adding a little.

And the relay has not stopped. Makers around the world keep building new cups from the ingredients of their own place. The cup you eat today is the newest page of that long story. In the next chapter, we look at what that cup is made of.