Gianfrancesco Cutelli

For Gianfrancesco Cutelli – born in Milazzo to a Sicilian father and a mother from the Marche – the memory of the summers spent in Sicily as a child is filled with the aromas and flavours of the island, and most of all of the flavour of ice creams and granitas. An intense memory, made of sweetness and light-heartedness which in 2004, after years spent working with food and wine, led Cutelli to open his first ice cream shop in Pisa, the town where he grew up after his family moved there.

The place is simple. Here he offers authentic flavours, with a very strong connection with tradition and the past, which for Gianfrancesco and his brother Marco is already stated in the name of the gelateria "De' Coltelli". A choice that was made as a tribute to Francesco Procopio De' Coltelli, an international ambassador of gelato from the 17th century, to whom they are related.

Today, in the two ice cream shops in Tuscany – on top of Pisa, there’s now one in Lucca – the maestro gelatiere, together with his collaborators makes gelato following two basic rules: only high quality whole fresh milk, fresh free range eggs and seasonal fruit, organic and local.

Seasonality is essential. According to Cutelli – one of the authors of "Avanguardia Gelato" – there are not exceptions. Or better, there mostly aren’t. While pine nuts and organic sheep’s milk ricotta are from Parco di San Rossore, the chocolate is produced by Paul De Bondt and the fresh fruit is Tuscan, there are some exceptions made with some raw materials.

Cutelli in fact makes these exceptions happily, for the sake of creativity, when he chooses ingredients that are renowned excellences, such as lemons form Sorrento, Gentile hazelnuts from Piedmont and almonds from Noto.

So Cutelli’s gelato is now "gourmet", and one of the most popular abroad too (even emirs love it) just like the granitas, among the best strictly Sicilian ones to have left the island.