Why you should experience Amorino in Milan, Italy.
Amorino is a polished gelato boutique where Duomo's nineteenth-century culture of cafés and covered shopping arcades meets Cristiano Sereni and Paolo Benassi's Italian gelato craft, petal-shaped cones and a confectionery concept that grew from Paris into more than 300 locations worldwide.
Set within Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II near Piazza del Duomo and just steps from the arcade's central octagon, the boutique occupies Giuseppe Mengoni's great glass-and-iron passage linking the cathedral square with Piazza della Scala. The compact counter places tubs of gelato behind glass beneath the Galleria's soaring vaulted roof, concentrating preparation within one of Milan's grandest commercial interiors. Staff build cones with a spatula one curved layer at a time, allowing several flavors to become individual petals around the rim before a final scoop completes the flower. A macaron al gelato sits above the petals as an optional crown, extending the same combination of color and geometric presentation into a second confection. The result is a Duomo gelateria whose small-format service acquires unusual visual presence inside Mengoni's grand nineteenth-century arcade.
What you should know about Amorino.
Amorino is best known for childhood friends Cristiano Sereni and Paolo Benassi, who founded the company on Paris's Île Saint-Louis in 2002 to introduce their version of Italian gelato to the French capital. Sereni's connection with the craft reaches back to childhood, when entering the laboratory of his favorite gelateria at around ten years old exposed him to the act of making gelato; decades later he turned that fascination into a business with Benassi, whose own interest centered on developing recipes grounded in Italian traditions. Production was centralized in a single laboratory in 2005, establishing the operational model that supported a franchise program launched the following year. Barcelona became the first international franchise in 2008, New York followed in 2011 and the hundredth boutique arrived in 2014 as the company spread into cities including Milan and London. Another product development had appeared in 2013 with the macaron al gelato, combining the French almond-shell pastry with an Italian frozen filling and eventually becoming one of Amorino's most recognizable creations beside the gelato flower. The Vegan Society approved the complete sorbet range in 2016, and all gelati and sorbets became gluten-free in 2017. Expansion continued from 200 boutiques in 2021 to 276 in 2024 and more than 300 worldwide by 2025, turning the project created by two Italian childhood friends in Paris into an international gelato network operating across 22 countries.
Pistacchio Mawardi develops one of the collection's richest profiles through pistachio, giving the dense gelato a pronounced roasted-nut character that pairs naturally with the deeper cacao notes of Cioccolato Amorino. Vaniglia Bourbon del Madagascar shifts toward a softer aromatic register, using Madagascar vanilla as the central ingredient before fruit sorbets introduce brighter acidity and a higher fruit concentration. Mango and strawberry work particularly well as outer petals, where their clean flavors remain distinct as the spatula spreads each portion thinly around the cone. The frozen structure itself differs from conventional ice cream through lower incorporated air, controlled fat content and a slightly higher serving temperature, producing greater density and a silkier consistency. Seasonal creations have extended the repertoire through mascarpone and fig, Sicilian mandarin, pear with hibiscus and pistachio sorbet touched with Volterra salt. Macarons filled with gelato add crisp almond shells around a frozen center, joining French pastry technique to the Italian product that initiated Sereni and Benassi's business.
How to fold Amorino into your trip.
Amorino works as the sweet endpoint for an afternoon examining Central Milan through Counter-Reformation church design, Renaissance mercantile patronage and the twentieth-century transformation of Piazza del Duomo into a home for civic art.
Begin at Chiesa di San Fedele, where Carlo Borromeo gave an older church to the Jesuits in 1567 before construction of Pellegrino Tibaldi's new building began in 1569. Tibaldi organized the church around a single nave suited to preaching, with enormous pink Baveno-granite columns supporting paired vaults; Francesco Maria Richini later completed the presbytery and apse during the seventeenth century, extending a project whose influence spread through subsequent Jesuit church architecture. Continue to Palazzo Marino, commissioned in 1558 by wealthy Genoese merchant Tommaso Marino from Perugian architect Galeazzo Alessi as a residence unprecedented in sixteenth-century Milan. Alessi placed the great hall unusually at ground level and organized the palace around a richly worked courtyard; the unfinished complex passed through later ownership before Luca Beltrami completed its Piazza della Scala front at the end of the nineteenth century, decades after the building became Milan's municipal seat in 1861. Conclude at Museo del Novecento, housed since 2010 inside the Palazzo dell'Arengario conceived by Enrico Agostino Griffini, Pier Giulio Magistretti, Giovanni Muzio and Piero Portaluppi. Italo Rota's group converted the twentieth-century building for Milan's civic modern-art holdings, inserting the large internal spiral ramp that rises from the metropolitan level through the tower and organizes access to a collection centered on Italian art of the twentieth century. The progression moves from Tibaldi's Jesuit reworking of sacred architecture through Alessi's Renaissance palace for Tommaso Marino into the Arengario's conversion for modern civic collections, compressing four centuries of Milanese architectural ambition into the streets surrounding the Galleria.
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