On Thursday, at one of Cairo’s most central five-star hotels, the Italian Embassy in Cairo and the Italian Trade Agency will be hosting a five-hour tasting event for a wide range of Italian ice cream and coffee.

The event will comply with Covid-19 health guidelines, which means only a small group of attendees will be allowed to enter for a sequence of slots.

The variety of types of ice cream set to be offered promises to be diverse, and likewise the coffee.

Speaking at a gathering to launch the fifth edition of the Week of Italian Cuisine in Egypt on Wednesday, Francesco Pagini, the director of the Italian Trade Agency, said that one of the objectives of this year’s event is for the makers of Italian ice cream to better present their case to the Egyptian public and market.

Egypt, Pagini said, is a country with great local ice cream options, including many that are made on small-scale industry models. Italian ice cream, he added, has been making good in-roads into the Egyptian market in recent years.

“Italian ice cream carries a big culture,” Pagini said.

Italian coffee, Pagini noted, has already made a strong imprint on Egyptian tastes. This imprint is seen in the growing volume of coffee exports from Italy to Egypt.

Still, Pagini said, there is room for more to be offered on the wide range of Italian coffees, and the many ways of making coffee á l’Italianne.

Meanwhile, according to the Egyptian and Italian organisers of the event, the "wealth of Italian taste" is set to be thoroughly displayed in Egypt throughout the week.

In Cairo, Alexandria and Sharm El-Sheikh, Italian cuisine restaurants are going to be offering a non-orthodox selection of pasta, pizza, desserts and wine — the things that Italians take pride in, having been world leaders in their making for hundreds of years.

Last year’s Week of Italian Cuisine focused on extra-virgin olive oil that is an essential ingredient of many Italian recipes.

According to Giampaolo Cantini, the concept behind the Week of Italian Cuisine is not just to promote food traditions, but also food production and the healthy Mediterranean diet.

For the 2021 event, Pagini said, the plan is to advance further by focusing on one of the very first food products that Italy exported to Egypt and that has yet to be registered in the lexicon of Italian food: chocolate.



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