Family Stories

While in Baden Württemberg – Germany Arturo Bertolini was inventing his ice cream, on the Alpe di Siusi in South Tyrol a man had a dream to fulfill. When the time came, one sunny morning, Luciano Lenzi looked up at the sky and photographed a sign. Erika, the name of an old Garnì, was the beginning of an extraordinary adventure of artisan confectionery production.

From the meeting of two family traditions, one South Tyrolean and the other Trentina, the Erika brand inherits the story of those who know how to make ice cream and pastries according to traditional mountain recipes. Today, family know-how is the heart of a dynamic and constantly evolving business reality, where craftsmanship goes hand in hand with research and experimentation. We use the most modern technologies to guarantee authenticity, wholesomeness, transparency and the authentic flavor our valleys can deliver.

On the slopes of the highest mountain pasture in Europe, those of the daring Mount Sciliar, so fearless and attractive that it has become the symbol of South Tyrol, while the "Eisdiele Bertolini" conquers the palate of the Germans, Luciano Lenzi leaves his employment in the public administration. “He likes to climb mountains and when he reaches the top he jumps down to start over”, they say of him. And it is true because Luciano is a visionary but also a born entrepreneur who conquers peaks one after the other and, when he jumps, he flies.

He takes over an old Garnì, Erika, in Siusi. With the milk of the Sciliar Mountain and the fruits of its woods, he begins to work on his ice cream, he serves it to his guests, then to the guests of the nearby hotels, then when the requests come even from further away, he leaves the small workshop of the Garnì and establishes the "Gelati - Eis Erika ”. Production explodes but Luciano keeps on taking new projects. Pastries, coffee roasting, small breweries. Because the view from above is boundless.

It is 1993. From one end of the line to the other, Trentino and South Tyrol are on the phone. Luciano Degli Esposti, Luciano Lenzi's son-in-law, is at the helm of Gelati - Eis Erika. He is talking to Alberto Bertolini who took over the reins of Gelati Eis Bertolini after the disappearance of Eugenia and Rino. They produce ice cream, pastries and krapfen with carefully selected ingredients. They share tradition, passion, courage, but above all, they discover that they are looking in the same direction. They start walking together, map in hand, to become Erika Eis and start looking for a new, bigger home. They found it in 1995 in Fiavè where the milk comes every morning from the stables, the energy comes from the water that falls impetuously from the Brenta Dolomites and the view is lost in pastures and orchards. The enthusiasm and the forces multiply, as well as the ideas and the markets, increasingly attentive to the sustainability of the supply chains and to quality raw materials..

Erika Eis is an adventurer: she feeds on what she does not yet know, as the questions she asks herself each morning are much more than the answers she manages to find by the evening. She continues to look at the world with the same amazement of those who took risks out of passion, had a dream and believed in it, working hard, defending the heart to safeguard the routes. The future of Erika Eis is still to be written but it will for sure feature the scent of hazelnut paste, the gentle color of vanilla with its pods and the vastness of an immense flowery mountain meadow, because this is what she’s made out of.