At no later than ten o'clock in the morning, Italian ice-cream vendor Silvio Molin-Pradel receives his first customers rushing to buy their favourite flavour in his parlour in Vienna, where his family has been selling the product since 1886. The Viennese population developed a taste for Italian ice-cream under the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the arrival of producers from the Dolomites. "They first started as street vendors, with small carts and it worked well," explains Molin-Pradel. Today, Vienna has the highest density of ice-cream parlours in Europe, with a total of 367 in the country of 9 million people. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was among the first to make Italian ice-cream accessible outside of the peninsula before it became widespread across Europe. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES