In Catania, a seventy-year-old pastry shop sets the standard on generational handover
From Vincenzo to Marta, the handover in a historic pastry shop on Via Etnea. A story of tradition, sourdough and Instagram, told without romance.
It is four in the morning. Via Etnea is still dark. Behind the window of a pastry shop that opened in 1956, the light is already on. Marta Spinella, thirty-four, entered twenty minutes ago. Her father Vincenzo, seventy-two, came in two hours earlier. The day starts like this, and like this it has started for three generations of the Spinella family, since grandfather Salvatore came back from Milan with the idea of opening a pastry shop in the city centre.
The question everyone is asking
The question of generational handover, in Sicily as in the rest of Italy, looks simple from the outside. Will the children take over the venue? Short answer: it depends. Longer answer: it depends mostly on how the transition is managed.
According to data from the Camera di Commercio del Sud-Est Sicilia, between 2018 and 2024 22 per cent of historic pastry shops with over forty years of activity have closed. The main cause, according to the surveys, is not economic. It is the failed generational transition. Children choose something else, or they take over the venue but do not manage to bring it into the new world.
The Spinella story
The Via Etnea story, against this backdrop, is one of the cases where the transition is working. Marta returned to the lab after eight years in Milan, first as an intern in a Michelin-star pastry kitchen, then as head pastry chef at a downtown hotel. When her father started to visibly tire, in 2022, she came back. But not to do what was already being done.
"I told dad: either we change something, or we close within five years," she says. "He wasn't happy to hear it. But he knew it was true."
What changed (and what stayed)
The changes, over three years, were selective. The grandfather's wood-fired oven, certain base doughs with sourdough, the small almond pastries for breakfast, stayed exactly as in the seventies. That is why people walk in. Changing them would have been suicide.
But the rest was rethought. The counter was reorganised to better display new pastry products (modern mini-cassate, Bronte pistachio cannoli, low-sugar single-portion creams), communication moved to Instagram with a weekly editorial plan, the cake ordering system for special occasions went online. The most important thing, says Marta, was adding specialty coffee next to classic coffee, without removing the classic.
"In Sicily you cannot remove your father's coffee from the counter. That is religion. But you can add a specialty coffee for those who want it. And you find out you sell a lot of it."
Revenue went up (but that is not the point)
Over three years of transition, Spinella revenue grew by 41 per cent. The point, however, according to Marta, is not the revenue. It is that her father, today, works two hours less per day. And when he goes home in the evening, he speaks about the venue with pride, not worry. "The goal was not to grow, it was to stop dying. Growth came after."
The three lessons
Marta sums up three things that, in her view, make a handover work. First, do not touch what the customer already loves. Never. You add, you do not replace. Second, make changes gradually, and explain the reasoning to the regular customer, in person if needed. Third, accept that the father is still right about many things, especially raw materials and historic suppliers. "My father has thirty years of relationships with the farmers in Bronte. You don't build those in five years of YouTube."
The ripple effect
Since Marta came back, three other historic pastry shops in the centre of Catania have asked for an informal consultation from her and her father. A small mutual-support network is forming, based on a simple discovery: in Sicily, where tradition is everything, the right way to grow it is not to change it. It is to take care of it as you would with an elderly person you love. Add what is missing, remove what is no longer needed, and above all, never stop listening to it.
