It is the most famous Italian dessert in the world and has distant origins, although history and legend merge just like the ingredients of a creamy homemade ice cream. Who was its inventor? It is not known: plenty of people are claiming credit for it. Something similar to ice cream is mentioned in the Bible, and during Roman banquets, there was apparently a widespread custom of enjoying fruit salad with honey and snow. Marco Polo in China found evidence of the age-old tradition of freezing fruit with milk. But it was not until the 9th century that an ice-cream-like product introduced by the Arabs appeared in Sicily: cold drinks made from lemon and other fruits using snow from Mount Etna: the Sherbet, hence the sorbet.We leap across a few centuries and here we are at the court of Caterina de' Medici in Florence, where in 1565 the invention of ice cream was claimed by the architect Bernardo Buontalenti, and then a century later in Paris, where the Sicilian Francesco Procopio, in the legendary ""Caffè Procope"", created the perfect mixture to produce and package it. But what about Piedmont? Piedmont made an important contribution: it introduced the use of the so-called ""tonda e gentile delle Langhe"" (round and gentle Langa hazelnut), which made the difference to the extent that today the most popular ice-cream flavour in the world is hazelnut with its variations: bacio, gianduia, nutella or simply hazelnut grains to garnish cups and cones.
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