Giglia — Via Pessina

Lugano's century-old marron glacé house opens a second shop in the old town – hand-candied chestnuts, liqueur cherries and chocolate-dipped orange peel, made to recipes handed down since 1921.

Giuseppe Giglia SA has opened a gourmet boutique on Via Pessina, in the lanes just off Piazza della Riforma. It is the house's first shop in the city centre. The original address at Via Antonio Ciseri 15 – the building the Giglia brothers put up in 1933, with the workshop on the ground floor – keeps both its factory and its shop, and stays open on Mondays, when Via Pessina is closed.

The story starts with Giuseppe Giglia, the son of pastry cooks and candy-makers from Valenza Po in Piedmont, who settled in Lugano in 1920 and began candying chestnuts the following year in two small rooms on Via Zurigo, in Molino Nuovo. His daughter Mariuccia took the marrons glacés to exhibitions in Brussels, Stockholm and – against her father's wishes – the 1939 New York World's Fair, and ran the company until 1992. Today it is led by Cinzia Stuppia-Bervini, director since 2005, who calls the new shop a dream come true.

The method has barely changed. The chestnuts are boiled, then sit in jars of syrup in a bain-marie held at 53–55°C for a week, topped up with syrup twice a day; after glazing they rest in syrup for another day and are wrapped one by one by hand. The same workshop makes griottes and raisinettes – fresh cherries and grapes macerated in alcohol and spices for about three months, then dipped first in fondant and then in chocolate – and arancini, Sicilian orange peel candied for ten days and coated in dark chocolate.

**Best for:** a boxed gift from Lugano, or a single marron glacé on a walk through the old town.