Antonio Mattei

The original cantuccini, invented in Prato in 1858 and still baked from the same recipe.

Antonio Mattei — Prato-born, nicknamed Mattonella — opened his biscottificio on Via Ricasoli in September 1858, and the almond biscuit he perfected there became the one the world copies. Recognition came quickly and from far: medals in Florence in 1861, London in 1862, Paris in 1867. Pellegrino Artusi, Italy's first great food writer, put him in the canon as a man with the genius of his craft; Hermann Hesse, passing through, praised the biscuits in writing.

The shop never moved and the method never changed. After Mattei came his son Emilio, then Ernesto Pandolfini in the early 1900s — and the Pandolfini family runs it still, four siblings, four generations in, baking the same twice-cooked biscuit in the same town.

In a category drowning in "traditional," this is the original article — the recipe, the address, and the paper, continuous since 1858. The bags reach India as they leave Via Ricasoli: hand-tied, in the blue oiled paper the shop has always used, the knot done by a person. Two of them travel to Casa — the almond original and the fourth generation's dark-chocolate addition, and nothing about either changes en route. The counter is simply longer now.