The daily quest for un dolcetto is not an easy one. After all, it’s scarcely easy to do anything, let alone secure one’s scant options for pleasure. Not mere “instant gratification,” but true and actual pleasure. That was a challenge for someone as fastidious and sensitive to textures and aesthetics as Alessandro Domingo, a thirty-four-year-old former artist-turned-“businessman.” Though, lately, Alessandro had to ask himself if he was ever really an artist in the true sense of the word. For if he was, would he have been able to give it up so easily when it didn’t make him enough money? That is to say, it made him no money at all. And yet, he could have stayed living at his mother’s house on the outskirts of Bologna, in a small town called Mercatale. He could have lived out all his days there just working on his art. Bettering it, serving it. But something inside him—whether societal indoctrination or something like a genuine conscience—told him to flee. And, in order to do that, he would need to get a job. So he pivoted to studying Business Administration at the University of Bologna, and soon after got a job at F.I.L.A. (Fabbrica Italiana Lapis ed Affini) in Milan.

Needless to say, it was a cruel twist of fate as F.I.L.A. was a major multinational supplier of art materials. So Alessandro would be, in his own small way, helping other artists live out their dreams while he spent his own days watching his slip ever further into the abyss. So yes, you might say his commitment to seeking out one small pleasure a day that could bring him a modicum of pure happiness was very important to him. Some saw it as neurotic, this obsession he had with finding the perfect dolcetto. Others saw it as a “delightful character quirk.” Others still, sometimes known as “dessert enthusiasts,” could get on his wavelength, but didn’t quite understand that, for Alessandro, the “procedure” was about so much more than taste. It was about the ritual. Again, the pleasure gleaned from the act itself. But the act itself being enjoyed was contingent upon the delicious taste of the dolcetto, always complemented by a coffee. After a year of living in Milan, there was no pasticceria left unvisited by Alessandro. He knew them all. And they all knew him.

But he was growing wary of frequenting the same places. He needed the excitement of new quests for a more perfect, even better-tasting dolcetto. He was like a drug addict, constantly seeking a newer, more intense high. It was starting to distract him majorly from his work. Not that he felt “doing businessman” required much effort, but what little he could offer to begin with was starting to wane as his obsession with finding more varied dessert options escalated. He petitioned his “big boss” for more travel opportunities that would take him to other parts of Italy, where he could expand his taste buds’ sweet treat-oriented horizons. He yearned to make his way down to Napoli, but there weren’t many business opportunities there, as far as his boss was concerned. Never mind that the city had one of the most inherently artistic populations in the world—according to Alessandro’s boss, they didn’t have “money to spend in here,” as Vivian Ward would put it. Apart from being affronted by his boss’ blatant Northern racism toward Neapolitans, he was further vexed by the dwindling chance of being able to seek greener (chocolate-ier?) dessert pastures on the company euro. He would have to make his journey using his own money, and his own time.

To Alessandro, that ultimately meant quitting. Although he had hardly saved up enough money to do so, he knew, in the back of his mind, that he could always return to his room in Mercatale. The one his mother still kept in pristine, untouched condition. As though it were a shrine to her son, and she was waiting for his Second Coming anyway. Maybe he would go ahead and oblige her when his cash supply ran out. In the meantime, he needed to supply himself…with daily dolcetto quests. He made his way down the length of the boot on a Monday, after giving no warning of his intention not to return to work. Maybe they would just keep paying him anyway, he reasoned with deliberate naïveté. Alessandro simply didn’t care. His erstwhile “casual” love of dolcetti had become a full-time obsession that couldn’t be intervened with by something like a “real” job. So trivial and unsatisfying. Not like the pursuit of dessert. His consumption of it was like getting a daily orgasm. And the dopamine levels that were being released as a result had to be replicated (and topped) all the time now.

Making his first stop in Florence on the road trip to Napoli, Alessandro replicated that release several times over with a sampling of schiacciata con l’uva alla fiorentina, zuccotto and tiramisù, later drowned with a coffee that sent him to the moon and back. It was official: he could no longer contain himself to just one dessert a day. The road trip was accommodating the intake of at least three per every stop he made. And those stops also included Arezzo, Montepulciano, Orvieto, Attigliano, Tivoli, Caserta and, finally, Napoli (though he was also tempted to veer his car slightly farther off course to sample the dolcetti of Pozzuoli…until he remembered hearing it smelled like sulfur there, which would greatly inhibit his gustatorial enjoyment). To his shock, however, getting out of the car winded him. Made him feel out of breath to do such a simple exertion. He had overdosed before even reaching the final “injection site.”

Teetering toward Piazza del Plebiscito in a state of near blackout from the comedown of his sugar rush, Alessandro powered through long enough to heave himself into Leopoldo, a respected pasticceria “dal 1940.” Scarcely understanding his ability to verbalize what he wanted to the barman, he felt as though he was speaking in holy tongues when he demanded a robust order of capresine, pastiere, babà, paste di mandorla, migliacci, zeppole, struffoli and sfogliatelle. In short, everything he had been dreaming of during all that temperance in Milan. One dessert a day? That felt like insanity now, especially as he gorged himself like an unhinged madman on the sidewalk outside of Leopoldo. He didn’t care who saw, or who knew. About his dependency. He didn’t even care if he died right there and then. Which he nearly would have if a kind coterie of ruffian Neapolitan youths hadn’t spotted him, mocked his “fat ass” and come over to bat away the box in his hand to the ground…and then steal the rest for themselves.

It was such a jarring wakeup call for Alessandro that he swore off desserts altogether after that fateful trip to Napoli, after which he did return to Mercatale to instead focus his obsessive tendencies on the art he tried to give up for the non-art of business (no matter what Andy Warhol tried to say about it being “the best art”). Which ultimately made him view his “dolcetto a day” phase as an overcompensation for extreme dissatisfaction over the profession he had briefly chosen in a bid to stamp out the “curse” of being an artist. But perhaps it was a better curse than “dolcetto addict.”