Italia Pastries

10 days of traveling = 3 meals (or more like 3.5 or 4..) a day = a lot of eating = a lot of desserts.

gelato. pizza. wine. repeat. (insert some pasta at the end).

So yea, its true. Italy has the most consistently best gelato. I had it every day, sometimes twice a day. I had it by the leaning tower of Pisa, in the train station of Florence, by the Rialto bridge in Venice, in Trastevere in Rome and whenever else I saw it. 

Hazelnut & coffee in Rome; stracciatella and pistachio in Pisa; strawberry in Venice; cookies and vanilla in Pisa.
We made a promise to try a different flavor every time we had gelato but after about the 6th time, it was pretty obvious which flavors we had a preference more. My favorites: tiramisu, stracciatella, pistachio (only if its dark green!), coffee and caramel.  

There were also a lot of pastries. One which I had never encountered before is the sfogliatella, most well-known in Naples but also found in nearby cities such as Florence. There are two kinds, frolle (smooth) and ricce (curly). The curly one is infinitely better as it resembles a very crunchy multi-layered croissant filled with cream. The smooth one is more like pound cake and has a ricotta-like filling, but there was something slightly unappealing about the texture and there was also weird fruit pieces on the inside. Without the filling though, it was quite tasty.

Scaturchio - the nost famous pastry shop in Naples selling both versions of  sfogliatella. The curly one is on the top right and the smooth one is on the bottom left. The pastries on the bottom right were spongy and soaked in liquor. We were not a fan lol. But the eclairs here were very tasty. 

More sfogliatella, donuts filled with chocolate, nutella and vanilla, and a pastry filled with cream and covered in hazelnuts. 

+ Roasted chestnuts by the Medici Palace in Rome!! Ate these after about 10 hours of walking, tasted SOOO good
+ Chocolate liquor shots in edible chocolate shot glasses from Caffe Vicolo Del Cinque in Rome! A super cute book store that also sells 10 different versions of chocolate shots.
+ And one of the few times that we actually drank beer. 

To be continued....Venice, Rome, wine tour of the tuscany country side and the pizza of Naples!