La Sfogliatella Mary

"Italians call their first meal (usually just coffee) la prima colazione, or the first breakfast.). It’s common to have a mid-morning snack, which I suggest you do at the 200-year-old Pintauro at Via Toledo, 275 or at La Sfogliatella Mary, a stand you'll find at the Via Toledo entrance to the Galleria Umberto, just across the street. Sfogliatelle have been my favorite sweet since childhood, when my grandparents would bring over a string-tied box of them fresh from the Bronx. When I started coming to Naples as an adult and discovered that these were not holiday treats but what you eat here every morning, it was like the 6-year-old inside me was told she could indeed have candy for breakfast. But there are also rules. Like cappuccino, sfogliatelle are not something any Italian would dare consume after a big dinner. However, Neapolitans find excuses like the merenda, or afternoon snack, which may come as late as twilight. Like Parthenope, the siren founder of Naples who died of heartbreak and washed up on the coast, the sfogliatella also arrived from the sea. One origin story, rote but beloved, describes a 16th-century nun on the Amalfi coast experimenting with some cooked flour and milk during the dark early hours inside the convent’s kitchen. She formed the pastry to imitate the shape of a monk’s hood hanging along his back, thus inventing the smooth frolla version. The recipe was made distinctly Neapolitan when Pasquale Pintauro created a flaky shell that reminded residents of elaborate French pastries still fashionable in Naples. In the window of Pintauro’s pastry shop on the fashionable Via Toledo, the sfogliatelle were upended to resemble seashells, the new Rococo architectural motif in the city ruled by a Spanish Bourbon king. If you’re not hungry for a second breakfast this morning, fear not, sfogliatelle are available everywhere in Naples."

"The first place in Naples I had a sfogliatelle "