Why you should experience Grom in Milan, Italy.
Grom is a pioneering gelateria where Scala's theatrical and commercial center meets Federico Grom and Guido Martinetti's pursuit of ingredient-driven Italian gelato, a Turin-born company that grew from a 25-square-meter shop into an international name.
Set along Via Santa Margherita near Via Giuseppe Mengoni and just steps from Teatro alla Scala, the gelateria occupies the pedestrian heart connecting Milan's opera district with the great nineteenth-century passages around Piazza del Duomo. Its compact storefront follows the visual restraint that Grom established across its shops, keeping the counter and service area direct instead of turning elaborate displays into the principal attraction. Gelato sits inside covered pozzetti, the cylindrical refrigerated wells that Martinetti and Grom selected during the company's earliest planning despite industry advice favoring visible tubs piled above the counter. Cups and cones move quickly through the room, making the branch particularly suited to the constant pedestrian movement between Scala, the Galleria and the cathedral precinct. The result is a Scala gelateria whose deliberately simple service format carries one of modern Italy's most consequential gelato businesses into Milan's historic center.
What you should know about Grom.
Grom is best known for Federico Grom and Guido Martinetti's attempt to revive ingredient-focused Italian gelato after Martinetti encountered a Carlo Petrini article lamenting the disappearance of gelato made in the traditional manner during a lunch break in August 2002. Martinetti, trained in enology and agronomy, brought agricultural knowledge to the idea; Grom, then working in finance for an automotive-parts company, developed the business plan, with each founder committing €32,500 to the venture. They opened their first 25-square-meter shop in Piazza Paleocapa, Turin, on May 18, 2003, building production around selected ingredients without added emulsifiers, artificial colors, flavorings or preservatives. Expansion reached Padua, Florence and Parma by 2005, followed by the founders' purchase of agricultural land between Langhe and Monferrato in 2007 for Mura Mura, where old fruit cultivars were restored and grown for use in their sorbets and gelato. New York became an early international step that same year, and subsequent expansion carried Grom to cities including Paris, Tokyo, Osaka, Dubai and Los Angeles; by 2012 consolidated revenue had reached €24.45 million, and Grom Bakery followed in 2013. Unilever acquired the company in October 2015, when Grom operated dozens of shops internationally, initially retaining its Turin headquarters and its founders in management. The business subsequently expanded into packaged retail distribution, and the brand entered the Magnum Ice Cream Company portfolio in 2025, linking the company born from two friends' modest Turin investment to a global ice-cream group.
Crema come una volta reaches back to one of the founders' central culinary references through abundant eggs, fresh cream and grated Syracuse lemon peel, with the recipe connected to Lidia Alciati of the celebrated Da Guido restaurant in Costigliole d'Asti. Pistachio shifts the focus toward nuts, using a dense paste to produce a deeply roasted profile, and hazelnut continues that Piedmontese relationship through another ingredient historically embedded in the region's confectionery. Stracciatella folds crisp chocolate fragments through fiordilatte, setting brittle cacao against a softer milk base before gianduia reunites hazelnut and chocolate in a richer composition. Sorbets remove dairy from the equation and concentrate fruit, with Syracuse PGI lemon among the flavors that helped establish Grom's ingredient sourcing as a visible part of its culinary approach. Carob-seed flour supplies the principal natural thickening mechanism across the gelato, and the liquid base now rests and matures for five days before daily freezing at the shop counter. Crema, nuts, chocolate and fruit consequently expose the same production philosophy through distinctly different ingredients and textures.
How to fold Grom into your trip.
Grom works as the sweet endpoint for an afternoon around Scala that traces Milan's center through Renaissance private wealth, eighteenth-century opera and the nineteenth-century reconstruction that physically joined Piazza della Scala with Piazza del Duomo.
Begin at Palazzo Marino, commissioned in 1558 by the wealthy Genoese merchant Tommaso Marino from Perugian architect Galeazzo Alessi as an urban residence of exceptional scale. Alessi organized the palace around a ceremonial courtyard and a two-story hall, drawing sculptors associated with the Duomo into a decorative program incorporating the Labors of Hercules and episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses; the building remained unfinished after Alessi departed in 1570, became Milan's municipal seat in 1861 and received its Piazza della Scala façade from Luca Beltrami at the end of the nineteenth century. Continue to Teatro alla Scala, commissioned after fire destroyed the Teatro Regio Ducale in February 1776 and designed by Giuseppe Piermarini on the former site of Santa Maria alla Scala. Financed by the owners of boxes in the destroyed theater, the new house opened on August 3, 1778 with Antonio Salieri's L'Europa riconosciuta; Rossini's arrival in 1812 strengthened its role in Italian opera, and reconstruction after the 1943 bombing culminated in Arturo Toscanini conducting its reopening concert on May 11, 1946. Conclude at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the centerpiece of Giuseppe Mengoni's nineteenth-century reorganization of the urban connection between Scala and the Duomo. Its foundation stone was laid in 1865, and the cruciform passage joined arcaded Neo-Renaissance elevations to iron-and-glass engineering, converging beneath an octagonal dome measuring 37.5 meters across; Mengoni died in a construction accident in 1877 as the larger project approached completion. The progression moves from Alessi's sixteenth-century palace for Tommaso Marino through Piermarini's purpose-built opera house into Mengoni's iron-and-glass restructuring of Central Milan, charting three centuries in which private patronage, performance and engineering successively reshaped the streets surrounding Grom.
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