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Chef Angelo Magliocco has a saying from back home: “In Sicily, two grandmothers can feed 300 people in two hours from a hole in the wall.” Angelo is not a nonna and there’s a door rather than a hole at L’Amorino, but there are evident parallels in the passion for feeding at this tiny corner shop.

There are just 10 closely set stools inside, a couple of tables on the street, and a simple piazza at the back. It’s little but its ambition is large and its heart is huge.

Owners Cristina and Stephen De Pellegrin have a 20-year history of annual visits to Sicily. An architect and builder respectively, L’Amorino was their COVID-19 project. “We couldn’t go to Italy, so we brought Italy to us,” explains Cristina.

They channelled flavours and they brought some sounds, too: chef Angelo is also a singer and he often unleashes an aria as he goes about his making and baking. That would be enough of a drawcard but there’s more: videos of Italian street wanders are projected onto one wall. The whole experience is immersive and joyful.

You could call L’Amorino a pizza and cake shop, but that doesn’t encompass the artisan endeavour. Magliocco makes everything from scratch: napoli sauce, sausages, sweet and savoury versions of pistachio cream and – more than anything – doughs. There are doughs for paper-thin panini, crisp and light pizza slices, heavier and nuttier round pizzas and many different sweet pastries.

Come for breakfast and you might have a good espresso and filled panini, maybe with egg and spinach, or porchetta with apple, or my favourite, mortadella with pistachio crema and stracciatella. It’s rich and bright: the only danger is that you might die of happiness before you complete your tasks for the day.

Pizza toppings are inspired by the “Michelangelo of pizza” Gabriele Bonci, who reinvented pizza a taglio (rectangular pizza slices) in its Roman heartland. L’Amorino’s renditions are Melbourne marvels.

For the Di Saronno, garlicky roasted pumpkin mash is topped with slivers of roast pumpkin, caramelised onion, crisp pancetta ribbons and crumbled amaretti biscuits. It’s an operatic chorus of sweet, salty, crisp and luscious.

The Friulana has a broccoli cream base, then smashed sausage, broccoli florets, fior di latte and chilli flakes.

I’ve assiduously researched the sweet treats here, doing the hard yards yet again. The cannoli and cannoncini – their puff pastry cousins – are excellent, the tiramisu is exemplary and the torta caprese is a nutty delight.

But the unmissable treat is Baci Di Angeli (“Angel’s Kiss”), a light and fluffy orange-zest-flecked orb of wonder, filled with whipped rum-spiked ricotta. It’s ethereal and wondrous, truly sent by angels but happily accessible to earthlings like us.