We celebrate the sweet, lasting legacy of Italian chef Roberto Linguanotto, the co-inventor of the beloved tiramisù dessert, who recently passed away at 81.
Many of the world’s favorite Italian dishes have become such ubiquitous dining staples that people have built a collective mythology around them that spans hundreds of years. Yet as writer Mariana Giusti explores in an intriguing piece “Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong” for the Financial Times, a number of Italian delicacies (at least, as we know them today) are fairly recent inventions. Take the cherished tiramisù (a chilled dessert of ladyfinger pastries soaked in liquor and coffee, usually laden with layers of mascarpone cheese and a dusting of cocoa powder). It traces its origins to the restaurant kitchen of Italian chef Roberto ‘Loli’ Linguanotto and his friend Alba Campeo in the early 1970s, as Sofia Andrade for the Washington Post reports.
On July 29, 2024, Le Beccherie—a restaurant in Treviso, Italy where Linguanotto worked for years and the reported birthplace of the beloved dessert—posted that the talented chef had passed away (at the age of 81, adds Anthony Robledo of USA Today). Originally in Italian, the post writes: “We join the mourning for the passing of Roberto ‘Loli’ Linguanotto, who marked the history of Beccherie and the most beloved dessert in the world. His memory lives on in our restaurant! Thank you Loli.”
We celebrate the life of the chef, his legacy, and the interesting history that surrounds his delicious creation.
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The Man Behind The Sweet Treat
Francesco Redi, the founder of The Tiramisù World Cup (an official competition for the dessert based in Treviso), describes Linguanotto as a very soft-spoken man. “Loli has always been a hard worker, pragmatic, a man of few words,” he writes in a news release. Andrade of the Washington Post suspects that this is partly why he didn’t credit himself as a co-creator of the dessert until much later on, when it already became a staple in homes and restaurants around the world.
Though many remember him as the chef behind tiramisù, his first and strongest love was actually gelato (a frozen Italian dessert that, unlike ice cream, uses no eggs and far more milk to create a stretchy texture). In fact, Redi adds that he prefers calling himself a gelato maker, rather than a chef. After working at Le Beccherie—owned by husband and wife Ado and Alba Campeol—Linguanotto managed the Bar Gelateria Marcati in Mestre-Venice during the 1980s. Today, his family (primarily his son Fabio) owns and runs the gelateria Creamo.
The Beginnings Of Tiramisu (As We Know It)
Like most stories surrounding popular food (including more modern ones), recipes are passed down from one person to another, transformed and reiterated in so many ways that it can be difficult for scholars to trace their origins to just one source. However, many largely credit its creation to Linguanotto and Alba (including the Tiramisù World Cup).
The Le Beccherie website writes that Alba wanted to create a dessert inspired by a sweet treat her mother-in-law would make for breakfast (zabaione, a dessert beverage of egg yolks, sugar, and a sweet wine, which she would mix with coffee). She then enlisted Linguanotto’s help in creating a new dessert—thus, tiramisù was born, and they officially added it to the restaurant’s menu in 1972.
There is another version of the story, as Susan Orlean of The New Yorker and Robledo of USA Today report: the two were experimenting with the recipe until Linguanotto accidentally dropped mascarpone in a bowl of sugar and eggs, realized that the combination worked well, then later added ladyfingers soaked in coffee as an “upper” and rum as a “downer” for balance.
Either way, the pair created a dessert that did not just become a hit in Italy, but also outside of it as Italians who immigrated to countries like the United States brought tiramisù recipes with them. Alba and Ado both died days within each other in November 2021, and many news outlets also paid homage to their contributions in the dessert scene.
Conflicting Histories
We cannot discuss tiramisù without acknowledging its conflicting histories. Other Italian chefs like Baltimore-based Carminantonio Lannaccone claim to have invented the dessert after moving from Treviso to the U.S., as Maria Wiering writes for the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
Even farther back, Silvia Marchetti of News.Com.Au released a piece that claims it originated from Treviso’s brothels centuries ago, which served an older version of the dessert to weary customers to keep the businesses going (until the government shut them down in 1958). The original recipe, sbatudìn, was a simpler one of “shaken egg yolk and sugar,” as Marchetti explains.
However, in her Financial Times feature, Giusti states that the dessert’s recipe was not in cookbooks until the 1980s, and people normally could not find mascarpone outside of Milan before the 1960s.
It seems that whatever existed in the time of the brothels was a different breed of dessert compared to the tiramisù that we know. Regardless of what history one chooses to believe in, there is no denying how both Linguanotto and Alba have significantly shaped the dessert into what it is today. Being the man that he was, perhaps Linguanotto would not want the general public to spend too much time thinking or discussing the dish’s origins, and instead more time enjoying the sweet treat he worked hard to bring to customers’ plates.
As Redi writes in his article on the chef, translated from Italian to English: “It always seems that he does not want to disturb, like he does not need to speak louder or to obscure people with his ego. It seems like [he is] a man who has always known how to prioritize deeds over words.”
Banner photo via Instagram @tiramisuworldcup.
