From the sea, all this seems like a great book of history, which is pleasantly intertwined on the lectern of the hills, where the peace and silence of nature live. Many illustrious visitors have felt a sense of infinity, a divine imprint between the streets and houses of this pearl of the Amalfi Coast. Its name is the consequence of a cultural heritage that speaks of an ancient seafaring attitude. Adventurous stories of ships and sails, storms, shipwrecks and a lot of expertise …

La Sfogliatella S. Rosa, one of the best known and most sublime examples of the renowned Neapolitan pastry is a sweet rich in tradition that holds within it the secrets of a history as distant as magic … … ancient history that refers us back to 1700, in the monastery of Santa Rosa in Conca dei Marini and the expert hands of the cloistered nuns who lived there.

Between one prayer and another the nuns dedicated their time also in the kitchen. It was administered in a regime of strict autarky, everything was produced on site and the menu, except that, of course, for the elderly nuns, was the same for all. The local tradition handed down that as often happens with the most successful inventions, the creation of this dessert was by pure chance, in fact, in a day dedicated to making bread, the nun cuoca, very good at making sweets, is found in the leftover of flour of semolina cooked in milk, throwing is known to be a sin, so think carefully to add some ingredients that abound in the pantry, produced in their fruitful garden, full of fruit trees and a vineyard, from which they get a delicious wine.

Then, add some dried fruit, lemon liqueur (at that time had not yet become the famous “Limoncello”) and sugar, then, enriches the dough of bread with a little ‘lard and white wine, to transform the classic dough in a sweet shortcrust, it gets two sheets where it puts inside the stuffing previously prepared, creates a paste shaped like a nun’s cap and bake it in a wood oven. The goodness of the sweet was such that the Mother Superior remained entranced by the taste and smell of the new sweet, she also smelled the affair convincing that it could do good both to the farmers of the area, and to the coffers of the convent. Without any danger for the strict enclosure, the cake was put on the classic wheel in exchange for some coins.

This dessert was given the name of the saint to whom the convent and the tradition was handed down that on the day of the feast of St. Rose, at the time on August 30th, the cake was donated to all the citizens of Conca dei Marini.Over time, the sfogliatella is enriched with new ingredients such as: ricotta, syruped cherries, custard … For more than a century, however, the recipe for the Santa Rosa sfogliatella remained jealously guarded within the walls of the Conca dei Marini monastery. It was only in the early nineteenth century that a Neapolitan innkeeper, Pasquale Pintauro, owner of a tavern in via Toledo, facing Santa Brigida, managed to get (perhaps from a nun aunt) the original recipe of Santarosa.

Pintauro had a commercial lighting, from an innkeeper he became a pastry chef and his tavern was converted into a confectionery laboratory, then, to sell the cake more easily adapted to the tastes of the time, he made a slight variation on the theme, eliminating the custard and l black cherry, and suppressing the upper nub to a nun’s cap. The sfogliatella was born. Its most famous variety, the so-called “riccia”, has since its triangular shape, shell, crunchy, vaguely rococò composed of thin layers of puff pastry superimposed on each other, filled with bran, eggs, ricotta, candied fruit, milk and sugar.

Finally, there is also a third variant of the sfogliatella, the “frolla”, of round shape, made with soft shortcrust pastry and with the same filling of the curly sfogliatella. As we said the varieties of sfogliatella are the “riccia” the “frolla” and the “Santa Rosa”, the note that originally was garnished with custard and 7 I say seven cherries. They should be eaten warm, so be careful not to burn yourself of its hot stuffing!