A baker from Vergato in the capital.

Gentilini was founded in Rome in 1890 by Pietro Gentilini, who was born in 1856 at Vergato, in the Apennines south of Bologna. His entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, the Treccani national biography, published in 2000, says he trained in baking and pastry in England and spent about five years in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the 1880s. The company’s own history says he worked as a boy in Florence and Bologna and then in Latin America before settling in Rome, then the capital of the kingdom.

The sources place his first business differently. Treccani puts a workshop and shop on Corso Umberto before 1890, with later branches in Piazza Colonna and Via Nazionale; the company cites the 1890 Guida Monaci, a Rome trade directory, for a grocery with a bakery oven in the Esquilino district, which within a few years had become four shops. Among the biscuits he baked was the Osvego, which Italian Wikipedia lists with the Novellini as the brand’s best-known biscuits. The company says Pietro adapted it from the Anglo-Saxon Oswego recipe, using flour, butter, barley malt and honey, baking it slowly and packing it while still warm in tins; Treccani describes it as a compact-dough biscuit of English origin, adapted to Italian taste with vanilla.

In 1906 he moved into industry. Treccani places the first factory at the corner of Via Alessandria and Via Novara in the Salario district — near Porta Pia, as the company puts it — and Italian Wikipedia gives its name as the Fabbrica di Biscotti P. Gentilini. Pietro was made a knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy in 1911, the company says, and Treccani records a gran premio for the firm at the Rome industry exhibition of 1923. The company says its range then ran to 34 kinds of biscuit, plus panettone, torrone and Easter cakes, and that its first advertisement appeared in Il Piccolo – Giornale d’Italia on 15 December 1922.

A locomotive made of biscuits.

Gentilini’s emblem is a train. The company says the Gentilini train appeared in the early 1900s and was formally patented only in 1915, and that, together with the names of European capitals on the biscuits, it gave the products a cosmopolitan air and a faith in progress. Italian Wikipedia, citing RaiNews in 2015, dates the trademark filing to 1925 and describes the mark as a Futurist rendering of a locomotive made of biscuits. The two sources give different years, and we state both.

Packaging followed the shops. The company says that for decades its biscuits were sold loose, by weight, from returnable tins in small grocery shops, and that in the 1960s, as supermarkets opened, it replaced the tins with paper and polyethylene packs. In the 1980s it introduced 250-gram stick packs and restyled its corporate image; later it unified the graphic design of the whole range before its first television advertising in 2009, and it says its advertising won a Key Award for the best animated commercial in 2014. Tins have not disappeared: the company’s online shop still sells biscuits in tins and a range of biscuit jars.

The war interrupted the business. Pietro died at Vergato in 1943, Treccani records. The company says the factory was requisitioned by the Allied command and normal work resumed only in 1948, under his son Ettore, the youngest of his children, who had returned from captivity in 1946. Under Ettore the staff grew from 15 to more than 40, and the company introduced the Margherite biscuit, made on a machine he designed, patented and built himself, the company says. The firm became a limited company in 1949, according to Treccani, which describes it as being in its third generation of family ownership.

Biscuits and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make biscuits, and all of them come from Italy: Pavesi, Doria, Galbusera, Gentilini, Colussi, Misura and Saiwa. Italian biscuit brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner bar to a supermarket shelf.

A biscuit brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the breakfast or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its biscuits are actually baked and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its biscuits are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Three generations, still in Rome.

Gentilini has stayed with the family and in Rome. The company says production moved to a larger plant on Via Tiburtina, inaugurated in 1958; Treccani dates the move to 1957. By 1975 the company employed 134 people, and in 1985 it began making wholemeal biscuits and rusks, the company says. Paolo Gentilini, who joined in 1977, became president in 1998 and is also chief executive, according to the company’s history.

The current ownership is set out in the company’s own report under Italian benefit-company law. Its impact report for 2025 says that on 30 December 2024 Paolo Gentilini, as sole shareholder of Biscotti P. Gentilini S.r.l., converted it into a joint-stock company, Biscotti P. Gentilini S.p.A., and at the same time made it a Società Benefit, a legal form that commits a company to pursue stated aims of common benefit alongside profit, with effect from 2025. The report gives 2025 revenue of €23 million and 81 employees, describes the brand as established in Lazio and spreading through central and northern Italy, and says the company measures its impact with B Lab’s B Impact Assessment. It describes the business as the production of rusks, biscuits and preserved pastry, and the company says it uses only Italian soft-wheat and spelt flours.

The brand’s hold on its customers was shown in April 2016, when an April Fools’ post on social media announcing a sale of the brand to the United States alarmed its followers before the company revealed the prank, Adnkronos reported.

For a design guide, Gentilini shows how a train emblem and a biscuit tin can carry a family baker for more than a century. Compare Lazzaroni, the Saronno amaretti house with a steamship on its packs, and Matilde Vicenzi, the Verona bakery that grew into a puff-pastry biscuit maker. For this guide we use Roman red, biscuit gold and tin cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Gentilini’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.