The cornetto: a soft crescent of a pastry, sometimes filled with jam, Nutella, even pistachio cream these days, and lightly dusted with powdered sugar. It’s a sweet reminder of breakfast in Italy—usually eaten in a bar while hovering over the countertop, waiting for its warm friend, the cappuccino, to help wash it down. But what is the story behind this iconic Italian morning tradition? And what makes the Italian cornetto—while sometimes called a brioche or croissant—different from its similarly shaped French cousin?
The legend of the cornetto goes back to the Battle of Vienna in 1683 when the Austrians defeated the Turks. The story goes that the local Viennese bakers marked the victory by making a sweet crescent-shaped pastry using flour, butter, eggs, sugar, yeast, and almonds. It became known as the kipferl, which resembles the crescent moon, the symbol of the Ottoman Empire. Eating one of these pastries became a symbolic act of victory over the invaders.
How the kipferl transitioned into Italy’s cornetto isn’t known, but the pastry likely found its way into Northern Italy through Venice, the established merchant port on the trade route. As the pastry descended into Veneto, it developed into a slightly different sweet. The ingredients remain largely the same as the Viennese original—minus the almonds—and the dough is laminated (a method used to fold butter into pastry) as it would be in a croissant dough. While the shapes, ingredients, and method of making the French croissant and Italian cornetto are similar, they differ distinctly in taste and texture. The croissant has a higher butter content, contains no egg, and has very little sugar compared to the cornetto. As a result, it’s buttery and flaky, and is only lightly sweet. A plain croissant can be eaten with jam, with chocolate (pain au chocolat), or with almonds, but on its own also makes a great partner for the umami and salty, such as cheese and ham. By contrast, the cornetto has a higher sugar content, egg-enriched dough, and is therefore always eaten as a sweet breakfast item. The pastries offer distinct versions of how breakfast can be enjoyed: the croissant conjures up visions of lingering at a Parisian café mid-morning, quietly watching city life go by, while the cornetto is eaten quickly and while standing at the bar, bites peppered with vibrant conversation before moving on with the day.
So how did the Italian bar tradition come to pass? No one knows for sure. But coffee sidled its way into Italy via Venice starting in the 16th century. Initially, religious fearmongers were wary of it, but Pope Clement VIII eventually gave coffee his blessing, and it slowly found its way in Italy. The first sips of the dark liquid were taken quietly in apothecary shops. This was during the Inquisition, when the free exchange of ideas in public was made difficult by the threat of persecution. Nonetheless, intellectuals began drinking it and had a chance to share ideas while consuming it. In A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World, author Jeanette M. Fregula explains that spies and Inquisitors kept a close watch over these shops. As a result, coffee-drinking was usually done standing up, and with a measure of haste. By the 18th century, coffee houses had opened in Venice, and these eventually gave way to the bar as we know them today. During the post-war years of the 1950s and 60s, the bar became a preferred stop for a quick bite and coffee on the way to work. In today’s Italian bar culture, while some take a seat to enjoy their breakfast, many choose instead to stand at the counter, perhaps a tradition carried over from those early days in Venice when the fear of persecution loomed over, or simply because they are in a rush to move on.
As iconic as the cornetto is to Italians, there’s also cause for confusion over the use of this word. “Cornetto” and “brioche” are often used interchangeably, especially in Milan, where brioche is the favored term. But Italians elsewhere in the Boot will use brioche to refer to the Italian version of the French brioche, recognizable in the Sicilian-style brioche col tuppo, the sweet bun with a little twist of dough on top, which is traditionally eaten with almond or coffee granita on a hot, Sicilian summer morning.
There are also regional variations on the cornetto. In Ancona, ask for a “polacca” in the local bars. Named for the Polish army who liberated Ancona from the Germans in World War II, this sweet dough is wrapped around a layer of frangipane (almond paste mixture) and covered with a sugar and egg wash to give it a golden glow.
Further south in the Campania region, legend has it that the Polish influenced another type of cornetto. The “polacca Aversana” is a cornetto dough wrapped around a pastry cream and amarena (sweet cherry) filling. Its name is attributed to the Polish nun who supposedly introduced the flavors in a pastry in Aversa, where it was later reproduced and popularized by local baker Nicola Mungiguerra beginning in the 1930s.
How true the legends surrounding this mythologized morning meal are is up for debate, but today, a cornetto and cappuccino is shorthand for eating breakfast in a bar. Other popular morning offerings include the treccia—a walnut-studded and jam-filled puff pastry braid—or maybe a bombolone, a cream-filled doughnut. But the cornetto remains the immediately recognizable symbol of la colazione Italiana.
Just don’t make comparisons between the cornetto and, say, its French cousin. Not to Italians! In the US, it’s fairly easy to find a croissant in bakeries; a cornetto, not so much. For expats, the cornetto is a reminder of home, of a tradition that calls to mind ambiance as much as the food itself—say the word and one can almost hear milk being steamed and the rattle of cups and plates being laid down on countertops, while pastries are placed atop those too-small and plastic-coated napkins. An Italian breakfast is not meant to be the most substantial meal of the day, but it has its own rhythm and enduring social ritual that can’t be compared to any other.
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