ITALIAN COOKIES

Authentic Recipes and Sweet Stories from Every Region

ITALIAN COOKIES, my ninth cookbook, is a grand tour of Italy through its cookies. It is a deep dive into a seemingly frivolous subject that turns out to be not frivolous at all! The book was years in the making, and my research took me to country villages, towns, and cities in all 20 regions of Italy. What I discovered as I traveled from Piedmont to Calabria and to the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, is that much like Italian food and Italian wine, the cookies of Italy are regional in character, their recipes rooted in the land and the culture, and in local ingredients that tell a story. Butter in the north, olive oil and wine in the south; rich hazelnuts in Piedmontese Baci di Dama, and sweet, buttery Romano almonds in Sicilian amaretti.

There are cookies with histories dating back centuries, and cookies whose popularity attract travelers from all over. There are elegant, piped cookies, and fat, generous biscotti da inzuppo ~ delicious dunking cookies (and everything in between). I set out to discover their stories.

Among the recipes you’ll find in ITALIAN COOKIES:

Canestrelletti di Torriglia, a rich, flower-shaped butter cookie from Liguria ~ a cookie with a long history and the one that started me on this quest!

Baci di Dama al Caffè, coffee-laced lady’s kisses from Piedmont

Biscotti Ricci del Gattopardo: pretty, piped almond cookies from Sicily

Biscotti da Inzuppo, classic cookies for dunking in your morning coffee

Cantuccioni, oversize soft biscotti from Tuscany

Mostaccioli, chocolate-iced almond and grape must cookies from Abruzzo

Pastarelle di San Nicolò, wine and anise cookies from Umbria

Buccellati, spiced and iced fig and nut rolls from Sicily

Pabassinas, iced raisin cookies from Sardinia

And many, many more!

In addition to cookie recipes ITALIAN COOKIES also contains a chapter on ‘Basics and Embellishments,’ in which you’ll find recipes for basic doughs, jams and preserves that serve as cookie fillings, spice mixes, and candied citrus peel.

What struck me more than anything, as I worked on this project, is the fact that wherever I went in Italy, whether it was a tiny bakery tucked away in a village or a large, well-known producer, the most important ingredient was this: the human touch. In Italy, cookies are in large part still made by hand: hand mixed, hand shaped. It was meeting the people--the bakers and the artisans—who continue to produce these beloved cookies—that made this project so meaningful to me and worthy of a deep exploration.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

“An excellent volume describing specialties from each Italian region and how to create bakery-worthy cookies at home. Marchetti's easy-to-follow recipes will appeal to bakers of all levels.”
– Library Journal

Published by Gibbs Smith; coming April 2026
Photographs by Lauren Volo
Illustrations by Daniela Bracco

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