Birthplace of the tartufo — the Calabrian clifftop town that invented Italy's most copied ice cream, a sea cave church carved by shipwreck survivors, and a castle cell where Napoleon's brother-in-law was shot
Pizzo is a small clifftop town on the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria where a single ice cream, the tartufo di Pizzo — chocolate gelato enclosing a hazelnut truffle core, finished in cocoa powder — has achieved Italy-wide replication. The original gelaterie on the main piazza still produce the genuine version. Beneath the clifftop is the Chiesa di Piedigrotta, a seafront church carved directly into coastal tuff rock by shipwreck survivors in the 17th century and extended over centuries with carved figures from the life of Christ.
Pizzo was a significant Aragonese naval base controlling the Calabrian coast. Its most dramatic historical moment came in 1815 when Joachim Murat — Napoleon's brother-in-law and former King of Naples — landed at Pizzo with a tiny force hoping to recapture his throne after Waterloo. He was captured, court-martialled, and shot within the town's Castello Murat in the same year. The tartufo was invented in 1952 by Don Pippo Olivieri who had run out of ice cream containers for a wedding order and improvised by shaping gelato balls in his palms.