It's interesting from viewing the top 100 list that not only are the main cities not dominant, but the smaller towns are. Also the GUSTO CONSIGLIATO, or recommended flavor on the page, shows just how different real aritigiano gelato is from ice cream. The recommended flavors don't begin until the place ranked 50th, but you can see from the flavors offered that this is not ice cream such as you get in 98% of the gelaterie.
I think some people are confusing the list because there is so much Italian preamble. You have to scroll down the article a little bit to get to the list, then it lists the store, the city, and the province. For example,
#1 00 is, "100 Conserve Bio | Cesena | N.E." Meaning the name of the store is 100 Conserve Bio, in the city of Cesena. Ranked
#9 9 is the gelateria named Peschici, in the town of Foglia, which I think is in Puglia. The third place is Casa del Gelato, in Albania, Province of Savogna, in Liguria. The
#1 best ranked gelateria in all of Italy Brunelli, is in Senigallia, province of Alcona, in the sparsely visited Le Marche region.
As you go through the list for gelato, and similar lists for food, sights, beauty, and many other things, you find that the most visited, top tourist places are sparsely represented on lists as providing the best that Italy offers. Unless of course, someone is using TripAdvisor, the blind leading the blind (a tourist coming to Rome, where there are thousands of restaurants, eating in one or two places on a two day trip, and writing that what they ate at a take out place was the best pasta in all of Italy).
It really pays to not just visit touristy places if you want to get a good dose of Italian life. Here are the recommended flavors from
#5 0 to
#4 0 , and you can see the uniqueness, and how it is a chef curated dish, and not just ice cream from a bin.
Gusto Consigliato
#5 0 : macadamia gelato
#4 9 : Olive oil gelato
#4 8 : Fiorone (something like a fig)
#4 7 : Orange honey with szechuan peppers and grains of noodle (which won flavor of the year last year)
#4 6 Sbrisolana (something like crumb cake)
#4 5 vanilla
#4 4 sweet milk
#4 3 ricotta with blueberries
#4 2 Aglianico del Vulture (not easily translatable. Aglianico is a type of wine made in the South, around Puglia and Basilicata I believe, and Vulture I must think is the brand of the wine.)
#4 1 Ricotta from sheep from the island of Elba
#4 0 Pistacchio
You can see that going to a real gelato place is not like going to Baskin Robbins, it is a chef's daily creation, like at a restaurant. Skipping down to the top 10
#1 0 chocolate and figs
#9 Zabaione (a typical Italian pastry filling, something like egg nog taste)
#8 Prosecco
#7 sheep milk ricotta, honey, and pine nuts
#6 tzatziki (the middle eastern dip)
#5 vanilla cream
#4 squacquerone artigianale Val Samoggia e composta di lampone della Valtellina di Marco Colzani (not an easy translation, but my take is that it is an artisanal cheese from the Valley of Samoggia, with raspberries from Marco Colzani's farm)
#3 una delle varianti sul tema cioccolato fondente (A variety of dark chocolates.)
#2 zuppa inglese, con alkermes fatto in casa (English soup, with Alkermes, a sweet dipping liquor made in house.)
#1 highest rated gelato in Italy, Brunelli, in Senigallia, Province of Alcona, in Le Marche the recommended flavor is Crema Brunelli.
I think one can get the sense from this list that real gelato is made by chefs who have to make it fresh everyday using the finest seasonal ingredients, and their imagination. It's not like visiting an ice cream store where there are a variety of tubs selling cheap, factory produced ice cream that was probably made a year ago, held together by preservatives.
Gelato is a very special thing worth seeking out, and taking time to find a place that sells it near where you are staying, which is hard to do if you are in Rome, Florence or Venice, as can be seen in the Dissapore article. There are so many tourists who don't know the difference between ice cream and gelato, so most gelato place don't bother anymore. You can see that in the smaller towns that comprise most of the list, true Italian gelato culture remains alive.