When Veniero’s Pasticceria & Caffe opened nearly 130 years ago on 11th Street in the East Village, it was a pool hall serving pastries to its patrons in a mainly Italian neighborhood. The founder was Sorrento native Antonio Veniero, who soon realized he ought to import bakers from Naples, and after he did the shop reached its current high level of pastry quality and garnered awards in Rome and Bologna.

These century-old certificates can still be seen on the walls of the cafe — a glittering room with a stamped tin ceiling just beyond the bakery showroom. The showroom’s sumptuous display runs to dozens of cakes, butter cookies, eight kinds of biscotti, ice creams, fruit tarts, and individual pastries, some originally made for religious festivals in southern Italy but here turned into everyday treats.