What is Cool Gelato Italiano?
In 2008, Alberto Della Casa of Modena and Letizia de Lucia of Chieti moved to Arizona with what they describe as a mission: teaching Americans the difference between food that is made in Italy and food that only sounds Italian. They had spent about two decades as food market analysts and consultants. What they could not find in their new hometown of Scottsdale was real Italian gelato.
So they changed careers. They took courses at the Carpigiani Gelato University in Bologna, trained in Chieti with Massimo Barbetta, an Italian champion of artisanal gelato, and on February 14, 2012, opened Cool Gelato Italiano in a small storefront on the Scottsdale Civic Center, behind the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. Phoenix New Times reported the opening with a 20-flavor case of gelato and fruit sorbets made on site, plus gelato sandwiches and affogato.
The shop has stayed small and owner-run, and it has kept winning. New Times has named it Best Gelato six times, most recently in 2024. Its critics have praised the texture and the flavors; one called the gelato “like frozen silk,” and another noted that the shop is one of the few that makes its pistachio with real Bronte pistachios from Sicily.
The one thing that has changed is the schedule. Cool Gelato now opens only Friday through Sunday, from early afternoon into the evening.
How to get it right
Check the day first. The current hours are 1 to 8:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and 1 to 7 p.m. on Sunday. The shop also takes catering, private-party and wholesale orders by phone or email. A Tuesday visit will not work.
Taste before you choose. The case changes from day to day, and the owners experiment, including with savory flavors. Ask for tastes. Pistachio is the one with the reputation. Fruit sorbets are made fresh and are dairy-free.
Try the panini once. The gelato panini is a scoop of gelato inside a sweet brioche bun, pressed warm in a sandwich press. A New Times columnist called it one of the most original ice cream sandwiches he had seen. It is a novelty, but a good one.
Make it the end of a Civic Center evening. The shop is a short walk from the performing arts center and the museum, which makes it a natural stop after a weekend matinee. AZ88 and Pinyon are on the same stretch of the mall for dinner first, and the lawns and sculpture of the Civic Center are outside the door. Park in the Civic Center garage.
Compare if you like. Old Town has more gelato and ice cream than it did in 2012, including Pussycat Gelato on Fifth Avenue and the Sugar Bowl for old-fashioned sundaes. Cool Gelato is the one run by the people who learned it in Italy.
An Italian shop on Scottsdale’s civic mall
The Civic Center is an unusual place for a gelato shop. It was built from 1968 as Scottsdale’s civic heart, with Bennie Gonzales’s City Hall and library around a landscaped pedestrian mall, on land that had been a Mexican-American barrio. The Center for the Arts opened on its edge in 1975, and the museum of contemporary art followed. Locals still call the grounds the Mall, though it has never had a shopping strip. The handful of businesses that do face it sit in a few low buildings at its edges, including 7373 E Scottsdale Mall.
That building has seen plenty of turnover. The Orange Table, a beloved breakfast café, closed in 2014. Jewel of the Crown, which served Indian food on the mall from 1986, closed in 2025. Cool Gelato, in the same building, has outlasted both, partly by staying small and partly by doing one thing. Its awards span more than a decade, from 2013 to 2024.
The founders’ story is part of the appeal. They were not restaurant people. They were food-industry analysts who spent their careers studying what makes Italian food Italian, and the shop is close to a working argument for their point. The gelato and sorbet are made from scratch on site, and the shop’s own pitch is about ingredients and process rather than toppings and decor.
The honest assessment: the weekend-only schedule makes this a harder stop than it used to be, and the shop is a counter, not a café. But when it is open it is one of the best reasons to cross the Civic Center, and nobody else in Old Town has its record.