Fancy a big change in your life and start your own business? What about selling traditional world famous Italian Gelato? With the world economic crisis people need cheap and cheerful treats, like a good ice-cream.

Carpigiani Gelato University may be the right choice for you. Three weeks in every month, 20 to 30 students from around the world gather in Bologna for the brothers Carpigiani. In a tiered lecture room, a gelato maestro shows them how to transform lowly buckets of cream or bags of fruit into cold, concentrated flavour.

Gelato University conducts around 12,000 courses every year, and seminars are taught in Italian, English, French and German. Who’s signing up? “Mostly 40-year-olds looking for a new life,” says Patrick Hopkins, director of the six-year-old educational offshoot of the Carpigiani Company, which produces a majority of the world’s gelato machines.

The main goals of Gelato University are developing the art and science of gelato production, the comprehensive training of gelato entrepreneurs and the promotion of Italian gelato as a natural and flavoursome food suitable for all cultures.