Siena’s where I spent a semester abroad in college, and it’s always going to be a really special place to me. It’s where I made some of my best friends, fell in real love for the first time, and learned more about myself than I ever could have had I spent the semester stateside.

It’s also where I got totally addicted to coffee.

And gelato.

And breakfast pastries we just don’t have in the States. Specifically: bombolone, or as my friend and I used to call them, cremas. From Nannini.

Food was the glue that brought a lot of us together in the early days of that semester abroad. The first few days were kind of a blur as we all stumbled around the city, trying to figure out the every day stuff of life. I remember having my first real cappuccino at a jazz bar and loving it, and I also remember just pointing to food in cases and asking for it in remedial Italian, hoping like hell to be understood.

One morning I remember pointing to something that looked like a doughnut, and to my intense joy realized it was filled with this delicious, light, cream with a hint of lemon instead of some dense, overcooked custard. My friend Twann and I were in the same class and I can’t remember how it began, but we learned that we both loved these little doughnuts we called cremas. One of the few true joys of the day was getting a break in the middle of class to go al bar, and in short order Twann and I became the Norm and Cliff of Nannini.

Nannini had an air of refinement and class that set it apart from the other bars in the city. It had a main bar on Banchi di Sopra and a few satellite bars in other parts of Siena. They also had a little corner gelato shop up the street from the main bar. They had some gross looking pastries for sale (I think my roommate Jess coined them “after-birth pastries”) and sold Siena’s infamous panforte (try eating that without losing some fillings), but they had the best cremas in the entire country.

I HATE to make this comparison, but cremas are kind of like Krispy Kreme doughnuts. The pastry is lighter, and the best ones are filled with cream, but you can find other versions with marmalade or chocolate. The outside is dusted with granular sugar and no matter how hard you try, with each bite you drop a few precious grains down the front of your shirt.

Nannini’s cremas were different. (And as I recall, cost a few cents more than the other cremas in town.) Each side of the pastry seemed to be individually made and put together by magic, and the cream was a little bit smoother, and made with more love. Most important: the outside was coated with sugar that had been liquefied and painted on each crema by ancestors of the Renaissance masters. You will never see individual grains of sugar on a Nannini crema. The outside is beautifully coated with big, flaky panes of sugar, each one cracked into unique, sweet designs while in transit to the bar display case.

There are few relationships as pure and wonderful as the ones you’ll make at an Italian bar, and  Nannini became a home away from home. Once the baristi saw Twann and me coming they’d reach for the delicate papery napkins, grab us each a crema, and hand them to us as we walked through the door while the barista would make our due cappuccini. I think they are also the people who told us the real name for cremas was bombolone. After a while we didn’t even have to pay first because we usually ended up eating multiple cremas, they let us run up a mini-breakfast tab, and we paid  when we had to go back to school.

So yeah, today I went to Siena to see all my old haunts and do a memory lane walk, but I really went for the cremas. I’m not lying when I say I planned this trip around going to Nannini and getting a crema, and a gelato if I was lucky. I was a little freaked out that Nannini might be closed today because it’s a holiday, and then got paranoid that if they were open, they might be sold out. I played it cool on the bus ride down and told myself that if I didn’t get one the trip would still be OK, but when Nannini came into view I started running down the street to get in line.

And there they were. A whole platter, cracked sugar tops an all, waiting for me.

I paid first, ordered two, then took my place at the bar to wolf them down. Things have changed in Siena and Nannini—they’ve closed their satellite bars and the stand-alone gelateria has moved to a corner of the main bar, but it’s nice to know that after all these years, Nannini’s cremas are still going strong on Banchi di Sopra.