Gelato Making Class Florence 2025: Which Ones Are Genuinely Worth It

How Florence's Medici court exported gelato to France — and accidentally created French patisserie culture

Caterina de' Medici's arrival in France in 1533 as the 14-year-old bride of the future Henri II brought a Florentine household with specific culinary traditions — including the frozen confections that Bernardo Buontalenti and his predecessors had developed for Medici court entertainment. The French adopted these techniques (the sorbetti, the frozen fruit preparations) through contact with the Italian court cooks, progressively developing them into the French glace tradition over the following century. The café-glaciers of Paris (the famous Café de Procope, opened 1686 by Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli — a Sicilian who had learned frozen confection techniques in Paris from the Florentine tradition) commercialized gelato for the Parisian public rather than keeping it as a court privilege. The historical thread: from Florence's 16th-century Medici ice houses through Caterina's Paris transplant through Procopio's café to the global frozen dessert industry of today runs a continuous line of technique transfer. Whether Buontalenti invented gelato or merely refined it remains disputed — but Florence's claim to the European frozen dessert tradition is genuinely founded.