The 2019 Gelato Festival tour stopped at Villa Borghese in Rome on Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 April, from 11am to 7pm. It brought together the 16 best “under 30” artisan gelato makers in the world for the “Next Generation” competition.

The contest and the flavours

The festival village was set up in Via delle Magnolie inside the park. The 16 young makers came from 8 countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Hungary. Each created a new flavour, with combinations such as popcorn, peach and basil, spiced fermented raspberry, red orange cheesecake, lemon and carrot, biscuit and caramel, caramelised almond and vanilla, and almond and apricot.

The winner would take a place among the 36 finalists of the Gelato Festival World Masters 2021, the main international category tournament. That path involves hundreds of tests over four years on five continents, with technical and popular juries, and doubles as a strategic positioning project for artisan gelato and its whole supply chain.

Tastings, trucks and tickets

The event was sponsored by the Municipality of Rome and organised with strategic partners Carpigiani and Sigep – Italian Exhibition Group, with Air Italy as global partner and Intesa Sanpaolo as top sponsor. Visitors could join tastings, themed activities and workshops in three 13-metre food trucks, including the “Buontalenti”, the largest mobile gelato production laboratory in the world.

com/en/world-master/rome/”>Gelato Festival website. It covered tastings of every competing gelato, plus Sicilian specialities from Elenka and a special created by chef Massimiliano Scotti for Air Italy, as well as village activities.

Anniversaries and what came next

The festival marked the 500th anniversary of the birth of Caterina de’ Medici and Cosimo I, two figures linked to the origins of gelato. Rome was part of the 10th edition of the tour, which continued to Turin’s Piazza Vittorio Veneto (27-28 April) and Milan’s Piazza Castello (4-5 May). From late May it moved abroad to Berlin (1-2 June), Warsaw (8-9 June), Baden near Vienna (19-20 June), London (29-30 June) and Barcelona (6-7 July).

The Gelato Festival began in Florence in 2010, inspired by Bernardo Buontalenti’s first gelato recipe of 1559. It then spread through Italy and Europe and, from 2017, the United States, with 64 festivals in total before the Gelato Festival World Masters 2021.

Bring it to your business in New Zealand

Majors Group is the official Carpigiani distributor for New Zealand. If this inspires you to start or grow a gelato business, see our gelato shop guide and artisan gelato machines.

Source: Carpigiani news. Rewritten for New Zealand by Majors Group.