I met Marco Radicioni about fifteen years ago, when he was scooping gelato for Claudio Torcè, Rome’s master of natural gelato and a mentor to some of the city’s great gelatieri. I’ve been a fan of Otaleg (gelato spelled backwards) since Marco opened the original shop in Colli Portuensi in June 2012. Last week, during my inaugural Rome Deep Dive, I took my guests to make gelato with him at his laboratorio in Monteverde Vecchio.
Marco joked during our lesson that he changes occupations every ten years. He trained in hospitality and worked in hotels, including Rome’s Excelsior, then owned a catering company. He took up gelato as an adult, experimenting at home with countertop gelato machines, first a Simac and then a De’Longhi. It’s been fourteen years since he opened Otaleg, so I think we can officially retire the ten-year rule.
What stayed with Marco most from his time with Torcè was everything that happened around the making of gelato. Scooping put him face-to-face with customers, while working the counter taught him how to run a gelateria, how to build a business around something he made, and how a shop becomes part of the community. I love that the job I first saw him doing was the one he singled out all these years later.
After Colli Portuensi, Otaleg moved to Trastevere in 2018. Marco opened the Monteverde Vecchio shop in 2023, and that’s where he makes the gelato now. You enter at street level on Viale dei Quattro Venti, where the gelato is displayed and there’s a small specialty coffee station toward the back. Head downstairs and you can look through a large window into his laboratorio. Marco gets there every day at 1 a.m. and spends the rest of the night making gelato. His vertical Cattabriga takes skill and effort to maneuver, and each batch takes time and yields a relatively small amount. Watching him work the machine gives you a sense of how much he puts into getting the best out of ingredients he’s gone to great lengths to find.
We mercifully arrived at four in the afternoon. The first time I made gelato with Marco, several years ago, the lesson began with two hours of math, which I found genuinely riveting. For the Deep Dive, I wanted my guests to get to the gelato a little sooner. We still talked through proportions and how milk fat, sugar, and acidity work together to give you a creamy, balanced gelato. We did the equations ahead of time. And by “we,” I mean Marco.
We made Pistachio Squared, the toasted, salted pistachio I order all the time. It was luscious and soft, with an extraordinary depth of pistachio flavor. Marco agreed that the texture was perfect right then, but he said the pistachio, like many of his flavors, would taste even more intense the next day. I have absolutely no problem going back to Otaleg two days in a row in the interest of testing a theory. He was right.
We also made yogurt gelato with extraordinary dairy from a small organic farm. Marco used so little sugar that you could taste the full lactic complexity of the yogurt, right through to its tangy finish. We ate our late-afternoon gelato as a sort of aperitivo before heading to L'Elementare in Trastevere for pizza.
Pistachio Squared is my regular order, but Marco’s range is one of the reasons I keep going back. There’s Total Crunchy, a gelato built around the contrast between a creamy base and crunchy bits throughout. And every so often he goes way out into savory territory with something like tuna salad tramezzini gelato, inspired by the soft white-bread sandwiches you find at Italian bars.
I’m rarely a sorbet person, but Marco’s fruit flavors are extraordinary. He often works the pulp and skin into the sorbet, so you get some of the texture of biting into the fruit itself. He’s as restrained with sugar there as he is with the yogurt, and that bright acidity comes through in every spoonful.
If you go to Otaleg in Monteverde, take a look through the window downstairs, then head back up get yourself a couple of scoops. And if you find yourself back on Viale dei Quattro Venti the next day, you can always call it research.
