torta tre monti

Five layers of wafer

Visit San Marino describes the Torta Tre Monti as large round wafers filled with cocoa cream and hazelnuts and, in its profile of La Serenissima, as five layers of round waffles finished with an external dark chocolate crown. Italian Wikipedia gives a diameter of 20 centimetres. The same profile says the company’s two best-known cakes, the Tre Monti and the Titano, are handmade and without preservatives, and relays the company’s statement that most of the ingredients used for them come from San Marino. San Marino RTV says the recipe remains secret and quotes Neni Rossini, a great-grandchild of the founder, Simone Michelotti, as saying that the cake is still baked on the same wafer irons.

Three mountains, three towers

Tre Monti means three mountains. Wikipedia says the cake represents the Three Towers of San Marino; its article on the towers places them on the three peaks of Monte Titano, notes that they appear on the country’s flag and coat of arms, and names them Guaita, Cesta and Montale. Domani notes that some cakes carry the coat of arms itself, three towers wreathed in laurel above the word libertas.

A wartime beginning

Visit San Marino says that Simone Michelotti and his older children set up a small artisan workshop in the early 1940s, inaugurated in 1942 with the pastry chef Giovanni Zaghini at the head of the staff, and that the Michelotti family still runs the company after three generations. Several accounts tie the wafers to refugees. The Consulate of San Marino in the UK, in a booklet on Jewish refugees drawn from the book La meravigliosa bugia, says that the Mandelli family, who had come from Bologna and were linked by marriage to a wealthy Austrian Jewish family, found refuge in San Marino, that evidence suggests Mr Mandelli bought Michelotti some machines to make wafers, and that he made cakes at his own expense for refugees sheltering in a railway tunnel when the Republic was bombed on 26 June 1944.

San Marino RTV, on the firm’s 80th anniversary in 2022, says the cake was distributed in Italy by the husband of an Austrian Jewish woman who had found refuge in the Republic, a collaboration that may explain the choice of wafer. Domani tells of Giuseppe Mandelli, whose father-in-law, Leopold Grunfeld, fled Austria after the Anschluss and had run a Vienna café where wafers were served, and who met Michelotti in San Marino. Domani writes the surname once as Mondelli, and the Consulate booklet once calls the husband Pietro Mandelli where it elsewhere has Giuseppe.

A symbol of the Republic

Announcing a €0.70 stamp due on 3 April 2013 in its “Made in San Marino” series, dedicated to La Serenissima, the state philatelic and numismatic agency said the Torta Tre Monti had been awarded the Republic’s Marchio di Origine e Tipicità for artisan products. Rossini told San Marino RTV that for Sammarinesi the cake is a symbol, what they think of when far from home, and Domani quotes the journalist Antonio Fabbri as saying that, for a party or a celebration, one always knows what to bring. Its companion, the Torta Titano, is two layers of almond, peanut and honey pastry with a chocolate filling, according to Visit San Marino.

In Emblem World, torta tre monti sits in the San Marino food collection alongside cappelletti in brodo, nidi di rondine and piadina, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.