A day in the life: Tracy Fontana

Tracy and her Italian husband Giovanni have lived in Milan, San Francisco, Sardinia and now Barcelona, where they have been for eight years. They have three teenage children and have run many businesses together, including a travel consulting firm in the US and a design and communications studio in the Costa Smeralda. 

9am Our day starts early with the kids getting ready for school, but by 9am I’m on my way back home. I try to buy provisions for the shop early—cups and napkins, cookies and milk—because these trips can easily eat into the day later on. 

10am Swiit opens in the afternoon, but there always seem to be a million things to do before then. I spend this time working on marketing material and packaging, organising the shop, and posting on our social media accounts. I love Instagram (follow us @swiitbarcelona), as photography has been a love of mine since the analogue days when I used to develop black-and-white photos in my father’s darkroom. Now I like to mix photos of ice cream and our shop with images of the city as it keeps things fresh and not too commercial.

12pm The two hours before opening are devoted to getting the shop ready and contacting suppliers. We meet regularly with our wonderful gelataio Alessandro to discuss new flavours and ingredients. Be it choosing the farms we source our organic milk from or researching suppliers for organic açai, the tasks each day are different and exciting. We also devote a lot of energy to the look of our shop: we've incorporated antique doors in the ice cream display, new light fixtures overhead and have old-time jazz playing softly in the background.

2pm It’s time to open. This requires folding back the enormous doors lining the front of the shop and dismantling the window panels, which are original to the space. The building, a former printer’s workshop in the Gothic Quarter, is nearly 200 years old and we were very careful to preserve its historic details.

2-8pm The rest of the day is devoted to our customers. The best part of my job is watching people come in and see their eyes get big as they look at the gelato on offer. How many jobs are there where you get to deal with happy people all day long? 

8pm By evening we start to wind down and close up shop as the last customers head home. At the moment we close early so we can have more family time and enjoy a relaxing dinner together, but we’ll be testing later hours as summer looms. 

Before falling asleep, I often think about what a wonderful experience this career change has been for us. We usually get the itch to move on to something or someplace else after seven or eight years, but lately we’ve been thinking: “Where would we go?” Life here in Barcelona is so good.