Italy

Rome

Does longevity earn a place on its own, or does it have to keep earning it?

Rome does not need introducing to ice cream — the Fassi family was shipping gelato packed in dry ice across Italy in 1927, and Giolitti had been supplying the royal household for thirty years by then. The claim is that none of it calcified into nostalgia. Over fourteen hundred gelaterie are registered inside the comune, and a generation of makers is arguing in public about what artisanal should mean: Marco Radicioni building recipes by subtraction and choosing a vertical churner to keep the air out, Günther Rohregger carrying his own South Tyrolean spring water into the sorbets, Maria Agnese Spagnuolo opening her laboratory to a journalist's camera rather than asserting anything. Rome is also the one city here where the specialist press has published a lukewarm verdict on one of its own most famous historic houses and recommended the pastry counter instead. That gap between the founding myth and the current verdict is the whole case.

Last checked 2026-08-21

The selected spots

7 selected

01
From Palazzo del Freddo Giovanni Fassi
Palazzo del Freddo Giovanni Fassi
gelato · Andrea Fassi, fifth generation
The oldest still-producing gelato house in Rome, and the one with a dated act of resistance on its record: offered a way into the business that became Algida, the family said no and stayed artisanal. It still makes what it sells, in a building it has held since 1928, under the fifth generation.
02
From Otaleg
Otaleg
gelato · Marco Radicioni
The most checkable method claim in Rome: a vertical churner chosen on purpose to keep air out, and recipes built by taking things away. The milk is assessed daily and the recipes moved to match it. Two specialist outlets rated it among the city's best in 2026.
03
From Neve di Latte
Neve di Latte
gelato · Sabatino Baldassari and Roberto Tulli
The most granular ingredient case in Rome: not good ingredients but named ones, listed by supplier on the card at the counter, from a Bavarian dairy to a single coffee roaster. An independent tasting confirmed the labelling in July 2026.
04
From Günther Gelato Italiano
Günther Gelato Italiano
gelato · Günther Rohregger
A regional identity carried into the ingredients rather than into the branding: named Dolomite spring water in the sorbets, mountain pine in the signature flavour, a South Tyrolean maker who arrived in Rome by another route entirely. Three Roman outlets have covered it in the past year.
05
From Gelateria del Teatro
Gelateria del Teatro
gelato · Stefano Marcotulli and his partner Silvia
Twenty years on the same street under the same founders, with its own chocolate laboratory behind it and a signature that reworks the ricotta and sour-cherry cake of the Roman ghetto into a filled brioche.
06
Come il Latte
gelato · Nicoletta Chiacchiari
Fourteen years of independent coverage under the same founder, with the same signature flavour named in 2012 and again in 2026 — a longevity signal a modern shop rarely gets to earn. She learned the trade filling cones at someone else's counter before opening her own.
07
Fatamorgana
gelato · Maria Agnese Spagnuolo
The strongest transparency case in Rome: a self-taught, coeliac founder who let a journalist into her laboratory with a camera rather than asserting anything about it.