Gianni's Neapolitan Wafers

What is it?

The three-flavour version of the plain wafer, with chocolate, strawberry and vanilla layered between the same two rectangular biscuits. Neapolitan in a wafer works better than it does in a cone. The block shape keeps the three stripes genuinely separate, so a bite can take one, two or all three depending on where it lands, which is how the arrangement was meant to be eaten and is impossible once the flavours are swirled. The name does trace back to Naples. The dessert descends from spumoni, a Neapolitan layered ice cream, and travelled with emigrants who opened parlours abroad in the nineteenth century. The tricolour arrangement is the part that stuck. The wafers themselves are unflavoured, which is what lets three ice creams sit between them without a fourth taste getting involved.