La Dolce Vita: A Reflection on an Intergenerational Passion for Ice Cream
Words Hannah Strong
Photography Katerina Kerouli
My grandma Audrey was famous within our family for her sweet tooth. It might have been a hangover from growing up during the Second World War, when chocolate and candies were particularly hard to come by, but among the confectionaries she favoured were Turkish Delight, fruit jellies, and strawberry trifle. Most of all, I associate her love of desserts with ice cream – the piled-high 99 cones we would get at the seaside, or the way whenever we went to the McDonald’s drive-thru on the way back from a trip, my mum would turn to her in the back seat and ask if she wanted a cornet with a Cadbury’s flake (the answer was almost always yes).
I shared her enthusiasm for ice cream from a young age, delighted by our semi-regular trips to the theatre. At seven years old I didn’t really have much to offer in the way of cultural critique, but I remember being extremely taken with the fact that halfway through the show, everything stopped and employees selling small tubs of ice cream › would come out among the crowd. In my earlier years I’d had a mild dairy allergy, so ice cream was a novelty. I took to it much in the same way I took to the arts Grandma was keen to show me. I began to look forward to these occasional excursions for the promise of a small treat as much as I did for spending time with the only person in my family who truly cultivated my blossoming interest in the arts.
It was a passion that developed in later years with the suggestion that we should go on holiday together. The rest of the family would just as soon stay at home, so this was an excellent arrangement for the two of us with a shared wanderlust. We took four holidays together in the last decade of her life, with three of these being to Italy; her favourite place in the world. We travelled to Tuscany via the longest coach journey of my life, and in later years the seaside town of Lido di Jesolo and Lake Garda. There’s plenty I remember about these trips, from the litter of kittens I befriended behind an upmarket boutique in a small Tuscan town to the hotel we stayed in where I – then 16 – was the youngest guest by a solid 40 years. But mostly I remember the food – heaping spaghetti carbonara in Positano, an extra serving of tiramisu provided by a generous waiter, the worst pizza I’ve ever eaten in Florence. And, of course, the ice creams.
“I wanted to eat an ice cream by the Spanish Steps, like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.”
I had never had gelato before we went to Tuscany – I don’t think I even really understood that there was a difference between this and the Mr. Whippy I got from our regular ice cream van at home. There was a small ice cream parlour opposite the hotel, and we would venture down there once – or sometimes twice – a day to peruse the menu of exotic-sounding flavours displayed in metal containers by the counter. This was the year I discovered ‘Zuppa Inglese’ – a sort of take on ‘trifle’ gelato, with sponge fingers and raspberry sauce. Naturally my grandma and I thought this was a revelation. When we stayed in Garda, a town she had visited with my grandpa some 40 years earlier, I discovered an ice cream shop where you could serve yourself from large machines, which was extremely exciting to my teenage self. Wherever we went I would look up the best ice cream shops in the town, and we would make it a point to try as many as we could during our stay. I would usually go for the most ridiculous flavour possible – she would usually opt for vanilla or pistachio. (Always one scoop, in a cone.)
Among these three Italian vacations, we visited Rome for a day as part of a tour group. It was August and uncomfortably hot. My pale shoulders burned in the sun as we were shepherded from landmark to landmark, finding brief respite in the cool interior of the Pantheon. But there was only one thing I really wanted to do in Rome, as a romantic 16-year-old just getting into film: I wanted to eat an ice cream by the Spanish Steps, like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. I had no way of knowing then that my adolescent desire to recreate an image I loved from a film I loved would preclude a career watching films. I, like many teenage girls, just wanted to feel like Hepburn for a little while. As long as it took to eat a cone of gelato, in fact. So that’s what I did, with my own Audrey. Somewhere in the vast collection of home movies she diligently recorded, there’s even video evidence.
In the movies, though, ice cream generally has a curiously unromanticised status. It’s telling that Edgar Wright’s ‘Cornetto Trilogy’ is probably one of the more significant contributions to the canon, and fair play to Wright and his collaborators, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End do all indeed feature that most famous of mass-manufactured British frozen treats. One might think also of Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, lying on a gurney in a Vietnamese war hospital, saying ‘Ice cream, Lieutenant Dan!’ to an unim-pressed Gary Sinise, or Bridget Jones remarking that she’s “enjoying a relationship with two men simultaneously. The first called Ben, the other Jerry.”
This isn’t to say that the film world hasn’t had a marked impact on the world of ice cream. James Bond himself, Roger Moore, is supposedly credited with inspiring the creation of the Magnum, after he lamented that he couldn’t eat a choc ice without getting his hands sticky (though Wall’s deny this version of events). But it’s strange that there are only a handful of iconic scenes involving a food so universally beloved. While it’s hard to forget a beleaguered Dustin Hoffman reasoning with his son over ice cream for dinner in Kramer vs Kramer, ice cream is usually relegated to a prop or passing fancy. Vincent Vega might have balked at the cost of Mia Wallace’s five dollar shake, but that was almost 30 years ago. What to do, with this lack of meaningful on-screen ice cream?
For me, ice cream remains intrinsically linked with cinema through the travel my job necessitates. Whenever I visit a new city for work, I take great joy in scoping out the local ice cream scene – even in the depths of winter. My first time in the ski resort of Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival took me to the American institution that is Cold Stone Creamery, while I’ve eaten enough ice creams in Cannes to declare Brazilian-owned gelato shop Niva the crème-de-la-crème of their ice cream offering. Toronto’s hidden gem is Bang Bang Ice Cream & Bakery, where you can get ‘My Neighbour To-taro’ served between two freshly made cookies, in a bespoke ice cream sandwich. In Venice, you’re naturally spoilt for choice, though I highly recommend Suso, where you can get your ice cream served between a slice of panettone. I frequently joke with my sweet-toothed colleagues that I only attend film festivals so I can review the local ice cream scene, but the reality is, I glean just as much satisfaction from the small tubs on offer at the tiny cinema in my hometown, which still has an intermission in the middle of every film. When I took my mum to see Top Gun: Maverick last summer, I opted for strawberry and clotted cream at half time.
My grandma passed away last March, and six months after her death, I took a trip to Sicily – a place she had always wanted to visit, but never got around to. I marvelled at the local delicacy – freshly made almond granita, prepared by an elderly gentle-man before my eyes – and was reliably informed it was perfectly acceptable to eat gelato for breakfast, provided, of course, it was in the Sicilian fashion: served in a sweet brioche roll. She would have loved it.
