The company was founded in 1946 by Renzo Bagnoli with the transformation of the family dairy into a bar-ice cream parlor in Empoli; the name of the company derived from the nearby “Sammontana” farm located in the nearby town of Montelupo Fiorentino, from which the Bagnoli family bought fresh milk. In 1948, with the two brothers Sergio and Loriano, the bar-dairy was transformed into an artisan ice cream laboratory, starting to sell also outside Empoli. The first mechanization of production occurred when the Bagnoli brothers tracked down useful equipment among the pieces of machinery for the production of “ice-cream”, left by the US army in a scrap metal warehouse in Genoa.

In 1952 the first logo was born, that is, a red logo with the calligraphic style typical of the time, from whose final letter a long underlining began; in 1959 the Empolese painter Sineo Geminiani was entrusted with the creation of a character to whom visual communication could be entrusted. Thus was born the nice corsair who licks an ice cream with a wink; this icon coexisted with the yellow calligraphic logo.

In 1961 a new logo was thought of, this time with an elongated underline, and inscribed in a red oval. At that time, ice cream was delivered to bars and dairies in a metal jar designed by Sammontana containing six liters of ice cream; in those years of economic growth, refrigerators spread to the homes of Italian families and, with the small jar, ice cream can be eaten at home at any time of the day. The product becomes a cult object and guarantees the company the financial resources to start the production of packaged single-serve ice creams. Starting in 1964, the icon of the corsair was used in advertising but portrayed in full figure showing the slogan “an ice cream treasure”.

In 1968 the logo of the humanized cone was born with the eyes, the mouth, the red tongue and the slogan “Italian ice cream”; this logo was accompanied by the logotype composed in a capital stick. Over the years, Sammontana has sponsored various cycling teams as well as the football teams of Fiorentina and Empoli. At the end of the seventies Sammontana ice creams were distributed in bars throughout almost all of Italy and, in a few years, also in large-scale retail outlets.

In 1981 Marco Bagnoli, Renzo’s son and head of the company’s image, entrusted the restyling of the corporate logo to the American graphic designer Milton Glaser, author of images known all over the world; he revisited the cone by stylizing it and placing it in the center of a horizontal crescent. Sammontana has always paid attention to communication by transmitting a cheerful, direct, sunny and Italian-style image; therefore the slogan “Italian ice cream” was confirmed. In 2008, with the acquisition of historic food logos, Sammontana became a large Italian agri-food company positioning itself at the top of the industrial ice cream market, alongside the large multinationals in the refrigeration sector.

In 2015 the company started a new phase of its renewal process by presenting the restyling of the logo: the symbol of the “cone” becomes more central and contemporary, keeping evident the values of the logo which, despite the idea of Milton Glaser, is modernized lightening up and leaving the task of creating the typical semicircle of the logo to the words “Sammontana” and “Gelati all’italiana” alone.