In October 2007 twenty gelato makers arrived in Cefalù. For three days, from the 19th to the 21st, gelato took over the old town and the seafront with a format that back then had a lot of the village fair about it: stands, tastings, workshops, music, people in the street. Patrizio Roversi, Paola Turci, Marina Rei, Max Gazzè and Mimmo Cuticchio were there. In the end some thirty thousand people were counted.
That was the first edition of Sherbeth.
Eighteen editions later, from 13 to 16 November 2026, the Festival returns to Palermo with sixty gelato makers from six continents. In between lie almost twenty years of history, the move from Cefalù to Palermo, a pandemic that stopped the Festival but not the competition, different generations of gelato makers and, above all, a craft that has changed a great deal in the meantime.
In 2007 Sherbeth still looked, in many ways, like a great gelato fair. And that was probably its strength. It did not ask the public to know techniques, balancing or sensory analysis. You took a tub and you tasted.
Then, year after year, other questions began to gather around that tub.
Where does an ingredient come from? How much sugar is really needed? What determines a texture? What relationship can a gelato maker have with a farmer? And how much room can scientific research and technology have in a craft that still calls itself artisan?
Sherbeth grew as those questions changed.
Cefalù hosted the Festival until 2012. After a two-year break, in 2015 Sherbeth moved to Palermo. It was not merely a change of address. The old town of the Sicilian capital offered another scale and another public, and the Festival gradually began to take on the international character that identifies it today.
In the meantime the weight of the competition named after Francesco Procopio Cutò also grew — the figure who ties Sicily to the European history of gelato through the Café Procope in Paris.
Then came 2020.
The streets could not fill up and the Festival, as it had been conceived, did not take place. The competition, however, was not cancelled. Sherbeth built a digital edition, with fifty master gelato makers and the Digital Gelato Summit, keeping the Premio Procopio Cutò.
Today that story reaches its eighteenth edition.
And the comparison with 2007 says more than any slogan about what has happened in between. From the twenty gelato makers of Cefalù we have come to the sixty of 2026. The origins, the ingredients, the techniques and the very way of understanding the craft have all changed.
This year Sherbeth tries to bring all of this into focus through the idea of Contemporary Artisanal Gelato.
Not a new label for a gelateria window, but an attempt to understand where the sector is heading. Scientific research and sensory analysis enter the programme, thanks in part to the relationship built with CNR-IBE and Massey University in New Zealand. Alongside the gelato makers there are researchers, journalists and food professionals.
It is a considerable distance from that first edition in Cefalù.
And yet something has stayed surprisingly the same.
Sherbeth still takes place in the street, and the public still does what it did in 2007: queue up, choose a flavour, take a tub and taste.
Perhaps that is exactly the point. In eighteen editions Sherbeth has tried to grow the culture around gelato without taking from gelato its simplest thing: the pleasure of eating it.
