Why you should experience Gusto 17 Navigli in Milan, Italy.
Gusto 17 Navigli is an inventive artisan gelateria where Tortona's design culture meets a friendship-born project that turned personalized gelato into collaborations with chefs, fashion houses, Ferrari and Guerlain.
Set along Via Savona near Via Bergognone and just steps from the Tortona design district, the gelateria occupies a former industrial quarter where early twentieth-century factories have become museums, studios, fashion headquarters and creative institutions. Its tiny street-facing footprint keeps production unusually close to the customer, preserving the founders' original experiment of fitting a complete artisan laboratory into seventeen square meters. Sixteen house flavors establish the core selection, then a seventeenth changes through ideas submitted by customers and translated into finished gelato by the team. Seasonal fruit, Italian regional ingredients and repeated production throughout the day keep that personalization grounded in a disciplined production method. The result is a compact gelateria whose scale conceals an unusually ambitious creative history spanning artisan production, customer participation, haute cuisine, fashion and luxury collaborations.
What you should know about Gusto 17 Navigli.
Gusto 17 Navigli is best known for the Gusto dei Desideri, the personalized seventeenth flavor conceived by founders Rossella De Vita, Vincenzo Fiorillo and Stefania Urso after three friends from marketing and finance united around the gelato they had wanted to eat since childhood. De Vita brought a thesis on luxury and a master's in Marketing Management to the project, and Fiorillo arrived through Economics and Finance, backgrounds far removed from professional gelato production yet central to the founders' decision to rethink how customers participated in creating it. Their solution fixed the display at sixteen flavors and reserved number seventeen for an idea submitted in person or through social media, with one proposal selected, produced and named for its creator each week; the first four years generated more than 220 personalized creations, later passing 300. That participatory model attracted culinary collaborators as Gusto 17 established a partnership with Vòce Aimo e Nadia, led by Alessandro Negrini, Fabio Pisani and Stefania Moroni, producing exclusive gelati such as egg cream made with Paolo Parisi eggs and vanilla and expanding into frozen pastry. Fashion supplied another creative branch through editions inspired by Schiaparelli pink, Yves Saint Laurent black, Fendi yellow, Versace gold and Armani greige, connecting De Vita's luxury background with the design culture surrounding the original Via Savona shop. The collaborations later reached Guerlain through acacia-honey pralines inspired by the French house's lip glosses and Ferrari through 2025 Formula 1 gelato bars bearing its drivers' helmet numbers on chocolate coverings. Formal recognition developed alongside those commissions: Gambero Rosso awarded Gusto 17 Two Cones and maintained it among Italy's leading artisan gelaterias, and Forbes Italia selected the project among its 100 Italian Excellences. A childhood search shared among friends had by then developed into a Milanese gelato project whose personalized format moved naturally from customer inventions to MICHELIN-level culinary partnerships, fashion interpretation and commissions from international luxury brands.
Pistacchio 100% Sicilia establishes the classic end of the counter through concentrated roasted nuttiness and a dense texture, giving the rotating creations a disciplined reference point. Limone di Sorrento shifts immediately toward citrus acidity, with fresh fruit supplying the brightness that made it Fiorillo's personal Gusto dei Desideri. The personalized seventeenth flavor opens the format further, placing an idea from outside the laboratory into the hands of the gelatieri before it returns to the counter under its creator's name. More experimental combinations have stretched that freedom toward Spritz and gorgonzola with Porto reduction, proving that alcohol and savory ingredients entered the project long before its luxury collaborations matured. Crema made with Paolo Parisi eggs and vanilla shows the same experimentation through ingredient provenance, particularly through the version developed for Vòce Aimo e Nadia. Gusto 17 reaches its clearest expression when those approaches share the counter: Italian ingredients establish the foundation, the laboratory supplies technical control, and the changing seventeenth flavor keeps invention embedded in the original concept.
How to fold Gusto 17 Navigli into your trip.
Gusto 17 Navigli works as the sweet endpoint for an afternoon tracing Tortona's conversion from heavy industry into one of Milan's strongest concentrations of culture, design and fashion.
Begin at BASE Milano, housed within the former Ansaldo industrial complex whose origins reach 1904, when the site belonged to Roberto Zust before later ownership changes brought Ansaldo into the factories for locomotive, railway-carriage and tram production. Milan acquired the complex around 1990, and a consortium including Arci Milano, Avanzi, esterni, h+ and Make a Cube³ subsequently converted part of the protected industrial architecture into BASE, with Onsitestudio responsible for the architectural project and the new cultural center opening in 2016. Continue to Mudec, created from Milan's 1999 plan to transform another portion of the disused Ansaldo works into a City of Cultures and designed by David Chipperfield Architects before its Expo 2015 debut. The museum inherited civic collections built across generations and now preserves thousands of works from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania, including 1,574 Japanese objects, 1,627 Pre-Columbian and Amerindian works and 1,028 Chinese objects. Conclude at Armani/Silos, where Giorgio Armani converted a 1950 granary into a 4,500-square-meter exhibition space marking forty years of his career in 2015. Armani personally conceived and oversaw the renovation, retaining the building's unusual form and organizing four levels around a soaring central void; the inaugural presentation assembled 600 garments and 200 accessories drawn from his work beginning in 1980. The progression moves from Ansaldo's manufacturing legacy and its reinvention through BASE, through Chipperfield's insertion of Mudec into the same industrial inheritance, into Armani's conversion of a former granary for fashion, tracing the mechanisms that turned Tortona from a production district into a creative quarter.
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