Who invented tiramisu? The best-supported answer is the kitchen of Le Beccherie, a restaurant in Treviso in the Veneto, where Alba Campeol and the pastry chef Roberto Linguanotto worked the dessert out around 1970 and put it on the menu by 1972. That version has the most paper behind it. It is also contested, and the paper is thinner than the dessert's fame would suggest.
Here is what is solid. No cookbook before the 1960s has a recipe for tiramisu, and Italian encyclopedias and dictionaries of the 1970s leave it out. The word reaches an Italian dictionary in 1980 and an English one in 1982. Everything earlier rests on menus, a restaurant bill, family memory and, in one telling, a brothel.
The 1981 magazine article that put Treviso on the record
The story is easiest to pick up in 1981. That year the Treviso food writer Giuseppe Maffioli, with Annibale Toffolo, wrote about the dessert in the magazine Vin Veneto. They placed its making between the late 1960s and the early 1970s at the restaurant Alle Beccherie, run by the Campeol family.
Maffioli also named the cook: Roberto Linguanotto, known as Loli, a pastry chef who had worked in Germany before coming home. In 1983 he printed the Beccherie recipe in his book La cucina trevigiana, on page 423 according to the Accademia del Tiramisu, and called it the "legittima" one, the legitimate recipe.
Le Beccherie's own site calls the 1981 article one of the first written sources tying the dish to the restaurant. Most later claims either build on it or argue with it.
When was tiramisu invented at Le Beccherie?
Even inside the Treviso camp the dates wobble. Ado Campeol, the owner of Le Beccherie, died in October 2021 at 93. His obituaries reported that tiramisu was invented at his restaurant on 24 December 1969 and added to the menu in 1972.
The same obituaries were careful about credit. NPR noted that although Campeol had been called "the father of tiramisu," it was his wife, Alba Campeol (born Alba Di Pillo), and one of the restaurant's chefs who apparently invented it. Alba died within days of her husband.
The restaurant's website tells it more cautiously. It says Alba Campeol and Linguanotto began a long period of experiments that ended between 1971 and 1972, and that tiramisu officially went on the menu in 1972. The Accademia del Tiramisu, a Treviso body that promotes the city's claim, picks 1970 instead, calling it the year the dessert passed from oral tradition into the historical record.
So the record offers three dates: 1969, 1970 and 1972. The Christmas Eve date is the most precise, but its source is obituaries written half a century later. When Linguanotto died in July 2024, Le Beccherie credited him as the creator.
Sbatudin, Artusi and the ingredients that were there first
Linguanotto traced the recipe to sbatudin, egg yolk beaten with sugar, a simple sweet of Treviso farm kitchens. That explanation sounds right, because every part of tiramisu existed in northern Italy before anyone stacked it.
Coffee was already being mixed into egg creams in Sorbiatti's cookbook Il Re dei Cuochi (1873). The history of coffee in Europe had made it a pastry flavor long before anyone soaked a biscuit in it.
The Accademia del Tiramisu points to the 1902 edition of Pellegrino Artusi's cookbook, which describes "biscottini puerperali" from Conegliano, near Treviso. Puerperali refers to women who have just given birth. The Accademia describes the dish as a spoon dessert of egg yolk, sugar and bitter cocoa. That is most of tiramisu, minus the savoiardi (ladyfinger biscuits) and the mascarpone.
Mascarpone is the hinge. It is a soft cream cheese from Lombardy, tied to the area around Lodi. Yet it was made close to Treviso too. In the early 1930s a dairy at Cison di Valmarino, owned by Count Gerolamo Brandolini d'Adda, registered the trademark "Mascherpone Valmarino." Mascarpone being sold in the province by then makes the dessert possible. It is not evidence of the dessert.
Where does tiramisu come from, Treviso or Friuli?
Nobody doubts that tiramisu is Italian. The fight is between two neighboring regions, the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and Friuli has two candidates.
The first is in Pieris, near Gorizia, at the Vetturino restaurant. Its claim goes back to Mario Cosolo, then a Friulian deputy cook in the Italian Royal Navy, who is said to have first served a "Coppa Vetturino" on 19 May 1938 aboard the royal yacht bound for Syracuse. The trouble is what was in it: chocolate mousse, sponge cake soaked in Marsala, zabaione and whipped cream. No mascarpone, and no coffee.
The second is stronger. In Tolmezzo, in the mountains of Carnia, Norma Pielli of the Albergo Roma is said to have adapted the Dolce Torino from Artusi's book in the 1950s. She swapped the butter for mascarpone and the alchermes liqueur for coffee.
Her supporters have a bill dated 1959 listing two "tirami su" among the desserts ordered, plus the menus of two dinners held at the hotel in 1963 and 1965. If the bill is what it appears to be, it is a decade older than anything from Treviso.
| Claim | Place | Earliest date offered | What backs it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coppa Vetturino | Pieris, Friuli | 1938 | Restaurant tradition; recipe has no mascarpone |
| Norma Pielli | Tolmezzo, Friuli | 1959 | A bill, menus from 1963 and 1965 |
| Le Beccherie | Treviso, Veneto | 1969 to 1972 | 1972 menu, Maffioli in 1981 and 1983 |
| Carminantonio Iannaccone | Treviso, then Baltimore | late 1960s | His own account |
The food writers Clara and Gigi Padovani, who wrote a book on the dessert, treat the Friulian recipes as the first. In 2017 the writer Alessandro Marzo Magno, looking at the new documents, came round to their view.
The Italian state has declined to pick a winner. In July 2017 tiramisu went on the list of traditional food products of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. In 2013 Luca Zaia, president of the Veneto, had asked for EU protection based on the ingredients used in 1970, so that substitutes such as strawberries could not be sold as tiramisu. The Veneto got its own listing, for Tiramisu di Treviso, in March 2024.
The Baltimore baker who says he supplied Le Beccherie
The rival baker in this story lives in Maryland. In 2006 the Baltimore Sun wrote about Carminantonio Iannaccone, who opened Piedigrotta Bakery in Baltimore with his wife, Bruna, in 2002. He says he invented tiramisu in Treviso in the late 1960s, and that his Treviso bakery supplied desserts to Le Beccherie.
The food writer David Rosengarten thought the bakery might be "the confectionary missing link." He also wrote that "no authority or book ever tells you exactly where it was first made."
Nobody could confirm Iannaccone's story. Rosengarten asked for witnesses, and they had died. The invoices were lost. The Sun's reporter tried Le Beccherie by email and phone and got no answer.
Treviso has other names too. Some Italian accounts name Al Camin, where the cook Speranza Bon made a "coppa imperiale" with the classic tiramisu ingredients but not the name. She and her husband, Ottorino Garatti, later opened Al Fogher.
What does tiramisu mean, and when did the word reach print?
The name is dialect: tiramesu in Treviso, tirami su in Italian, roughly "pick me up." The linguist Paolo Zolli identified it as a word of Venetian origin in 1986.
That meaning has invited the racier stories. The novelist Giovanni Comisso held that the dessert was born in the 1930s in a brothel in central Treviso. The Accademia del Tiramisu repeats an oral tradition of a madam in such a house telling clients "Adesso ve tiro su mi" (roughly, "now I'll pick you up"). Another legend has it made in 17th-century Siena for a visit by Grand Duke Cosimo III de' Medici. None of these stories comes with a document.
The documents that do exist are recent and oddly far-flung. The earliest known mention in print is a restaurant column by Trevor Lane, "The Irish in Paddington," in the Sydney Morning Herald of 30 August 1978. The Sabatini Coletti dictionary dates the Italian word to 1980, and Merriam-Webster dates its first known English use to 1982.
Like the croissant and its Viennese siege story, tiramisu has a reputation for age that runs well ahead of the evidence. Its ingredients are old. The dessert, on the evidence so far, belongs to the 1960s and 1970s, a late arrival in a cuisine that had taken up the tomato from the Americas centuries before.
A notary's deed and a sealed recipe
Treviso has tried to settle the matter with paperwork. On 15 October 2010 three members of the Treviso delegation of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina filed notarial deed number 7947 with the notary Lorenzo Ferretto, recording the authentic recipe as made at Le Beccherie.
In 2019 the Accademia del Tiramisu named the restaurant, then owned by Paolo Lai, a historic venue for the Treviso recipe. The city held its first Tiramisu World Cup on 4 and 5 November 2017.
None of that touches the 1959 bill from Tolmezzo. Roberto Linguanotto, the pastry chef Maffioli named in 1981, died in July 2024, less than three years after Ado and Alba Campeol.
Questions people ask
When was tiramisu invented?
Tiramisu dates to the 1960s or 1970s, not to any older Italian tradition. Le Beccherie in Treviso says its version was worked out around 1970 and put on the menu in 1972. A bill from Tolmezzo in Friuli, dated 1959, lists two "tirami su", which would make it older.
What does tiramisu mean in English?
Tiramisu means roughly "pick me up". The name is dialect: tiramesu in Treviso, tirami su in Italian. The linguist Paolo Zolli identified it as a word of Venetian origin in 1986. Italian dictionaries list it from 1980, and Merriam-Webster dates its first known English use to 1982.
What is tiramisu made of, and where did the ingredients come from?
Tiramisu combines egg yolk beaten with sugar, coffee, savoiardi ladyfinger biscuits, mascarpone and cocoa. Each part existed in northern Italy first. Linguanotto traced the recipe to Treviso's sbatudin, and mascarpone was already being made near Treviso in the early 1930s, at a dairy in Cison di Valmarino.
Is tiramisu from Treviso or from Friuli?
Both regions claim it. Treviso in the Veneto points to Le Beccherie, with Alba Campeol and the pastry chef Roberto Linguanotto, and a 1972 menu. Friuli-Venezia Giulia points to Norma Pielli in Tolmezzo and the 1959 bill. Friuli listed tiramisu as a traditional product in 2017, and the Veneto listed Tiramisu di Treviso in 2024.
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