Ditrizio Pasticceria

Natural leavening sets the morning at this Cagliari pasticceria, where the day starts before dawn with the first brioche and can run to three hundred and fifty breakfast pieces. Piero Ditrizio leads the pastry work and a co-owner runs the sales floor; the shop opened in 2020, on a project begun the previous May, and arrived just as the city came out of its first lockdown.

An Italian counter in a Sardinian city

Ditrizio set out to break the local habit of dry, mostly Sardinian pastry and built the case around national and international Italian classics instead, while still buying honey, fruit and eggs locally. The result is broad. The case carries maritozzo, cannolo, cassatina, pasticciotto leccese, pastiera, babà, tartelletta di frutta, bignè, cannoncino, croissants and bomboloni, plus around twenty kinds of mignon, fifteen rotating monoportions, five seasonal cakes and five da credenza items such as caprese and crostate. A naturally leavened veneziana is the piece the kitchen is proudest of. Ingredients are named: French butter and vanilla, Sicilian pistachio paste, Giffoni hazelnut paste. At Christmas the panettone runs classic, with house-candied Milis oranges, or three-chocolate. Gambero Rosso’s Tre Torte marks the standard.

A compact room near the port

The setting is urban and tight, close to the port and the lungomare, which is why the shop works as both a neighbourhood pastry stop and a quick break for anyone passing through. It is a pasticceria rather than a café or a restaurant, so the counter does the talking and the queue moves. Lunch adds a short savoury run: arancina al casizolu, piadina and focaccia pugliese sit alongside the sweet case, but the pastry is the reason people line up.

Order the maritozzo first, then follow the classics

The maritozzo is the order to start with, the piece most tied to the shop’s reputation in Cagliari and the one that helped shift the city’s breakfast habits. From there, follow the counter through the regional classics that define its point of view: cannolo, cassatina, pasticciotto leccese, pastiera, babà, cannoncino and veneziana. For something filled and soft, the croissants and bomboloni get the loudest praise; for the pastry-salon side, look to the mignon, the monoportions, the cakes and desserts such as namelaka. The range makes sense against Ditrizio’s training, which ran from his father’s shop in Barletta through the Boscolo Étoile Academy, Sève in Lyon, Hibiscus in London under Claude Bosi and a Four Seasons kitchen in Singapore.