A taste of times gone by: Torrone.

Authenticity, wholesomeness and the artisan craft of Sicilian pastry-making are the elements contained in every torrone (nougat) or torroncino: little pleasures for the palate that take you on a sensory journey to rediscover the flavours of the past without ever leaving the table. Sicilian sweets par excellence, made especially for the Christmas holidays!

Combining the green of pistachio, the gold of honey and the white of almonds creates an artisan sweet so good that it captures the typical scents and flavours of this land, blended with the warm, vivid colours that define its character.

But where does torrone come from?

In Italy there is a real battle between towns over who created traditional torrone as we know it today. The Cremona version is perhaps one of the best known: it is said that torrone was made for the first time for the wedding banquet of Bianca Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza on 25 October 1441. The shape of the torrone is said to faithfully reproduce the Torrazzo, the city's bell tower (from which the word torrone probably derives).

In Sicily we even have two different words for torrone: cubbaita and giuggiulena. These two terms suggest that it was the Arabs who brought torrone to the Mediterranean basin, to Sicily, Spain and the rest of Italy. With the words cubbaita and giuggiulena, the Arabs referred to a sweet made of honey and sesame: torrone, then, is simply a variant with toasted, roasted seeds.

And the name? Some say it derives from the Latin verb meaning “to toast” (referring to the toasting of hazelnuts and almonds). Others see an Arabic origin in the word torrone: supporting this theory is the 11th-century treatise “De medicinis et cibis semplicibus”, written by an Arab physician, which mentions torrone under the name turun.

There are many traditional Italian Christmas sweets, but the only one that truly unites us from North to South is Torrone.