As Christmas nears so does the time for Christmas sweets - those tasty homemade and industrial products whose flavors and fragrances accompany us during the Christmas holidays. There is a great variety of Christmas sweets in Italy, with significant differences from one region, one province, and one city to the next. Just think: depending on the location, the same sweet can be called by a different name. So it’s worth providing you with as thorough a guide as possible.

Let’s start in northern Italy, precisely in Trentino Alto Adige, a region with bragging rights to numerous original sweets, from sweet breads such as Zelten (a type of fruitcake - the version from Trentino is a peasant’s version and contains more dough than candied fruit as compared to that from Alto Adige), enhanced with various ingredients; to Buchteln, which is filled with marmalade, covered with sugar and vanilla, and baked in the oven.