If it’s your first visit to Vecchio Pallino and you’re not familiar with the gelato and sorbetto that’s on the menu, there’s no need to worry. An introduction to the gelateria’s offerings should only take about three hours.
At least that’s according to Vecchio Pallino’s owner Mauro Di Luzio, who kept up a steady patter of funny lines as he filled orders on a recent hot Friday afternoon. (Spoiler alert: The introduction actually took about a minute, as Di Luzio told us that all of his products are made fresh in-house with no preservatives or dyes.) Our order consisted of two scoops of peach cobbler cheesecake gelato in a cup with a cone on top; and an affogato, which was a scoop of tiramisu with espresso poured over.
Those were the pick-me-ups we needed to finish up a day in Salado, a village of 2,394 residents about 47 miles south of Waco on Interstate 35.
Salado is home to more than 40 historical sites, and our first stop was at the Salado Museum and College Park, on the south end of Main Street. The park is on the grounds of Salado College, which was built in 1859 for students from first grade through two years of college. The school was founded “based on the then-unheard of belief that both men and women deserve equal access to higher education in a nondenominational setting,” according to the museum’s website.
The park contains plaques detailing the history of the college as well as ruins of some of the original campus buildings.
The adjacent museum, which has been in operation since 1959, honors the Scottish founders of Salado with artifacts, papers and rotating exhibits throughout the year. The museum is in the same 100-year-old stone building as the Salado Visitors Center. We made a stop there and met tourism marketing manager Deanna Whitson and visitor center coordinator Melanie Lane, who were generous with their time and knowledge of places we should visit.
The visitors center and museum are across Main Street from the historic Stagecoach Inn, which is in the midst of a major renovation. It opened in 1861, which at one point made it the second-oldest continuously-running hotel in Texas. (The oldest is the Excelsior House Hotel in Jefferson, which began operations in 1858. The Menger Hotel in San Antonio opened in 1859 but closed for a while during the Civil War.) Stagecoach closed for a renovation project in 2015.
Stagecoach Inn, which was recently taken over by Austin-based Alexa Management, currently has 48 rooms available — all of them are dog-friendly — along with the pool and pavilion. The beloved Stagecoach Restaurant is scheduled to open later this fall under the leadership of Rusty Winkstern, who owns the popular Monument Café in Georgetown. For many years, the Stagecoach Restaurant was known for its hush puppies, and the new management company has promised that they will be on the menu. Traditionally, Stagecoach’s hush puppy is “a little lighter than a typical cornbread hushpuppy, which has a thick exterior and dense interior, this is more like hot-water cornbread, with a feathery inside that’s a tiny bit sweet at the front and a smidge salty at the finish,” June Naylor wrote in Texas Highways magazine in 2018.
Main Street and most of the streets jutting off of it are full of small, locally-owned galleries, boutiques, restaurants, coffee shops and other retail establishments. It would definitely take more than the one day we were in town to enjoy them all.
Sofi’s at the Stagecoach, also known as “Salado’s world market” for its selection of clothing and home décor items from all parts of the globe, also has a small room just inside the front door that is chock full of records, with bin after bin of music from many genres.
At Mud Pies Pottery, you’ll find the lovely and functional stoneware pottery created by owner and artist Titia Arledge Califano. The shop also sells Sir Wigglesworth’s Homemade Fudge, which has been a Salado staple for nearly 30 years. Sir Wigglesworth’s was a separate store for 18 years, and has been part of Mud Pies for the past eight years.
One of our favorite — and longest — stops was at Salado Olive Oil Co., which sells a huge variety of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. We were there for a while because visitors are encouraged to taste test. Open bottles and tiny paper cups are set throughout the store.
The olive oil is made from a blend of chemlali, chetoui and arbequina olives from Tunisia, and the store’s brochure lists 45 varieties of infused extra virgin olive oil with flavors like black garlic, cilantro lime, jalapeno and strawberry basil. The balsamic vinegar from Modena, Italy is available in 56 flavors, with an additional 29 varieties of white balsamic vinegar. We sampled many flavors of both olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and one of our favorites was the bourbon balsamic, but the last bottle had been sold just minutes before we arrived. We ended up buying a bottle of 25-year-old traditional balsamic and Smoked Fig Balsamic BBQ Sauce. The store’s website — SaladoOliveOilCo.com — has numerous recipes using its products.
For lunch, we stopped at The Shed, a former goat barn converted to a tavern. Our order consisted of a cheeseburger basket with sweet potato fries and generous serving of pulled pork nachos, and we pretty much cleaned our plates.
Down the street at Salado Glassworks we saw some beautiful glass pieces — Do Not Touch warning signs are everywhere — that were created in-house. The artist Gail Allard can often be seen at work in his studio, which is connected to the gallery, though he’s usually not there creating during the hot summer months. The gallery also offers blow-your-own glass classes where visitors can create their own works of art.
When Michael Pritchett was looking for a gallery in Salado to represent his work several years back, he was striking out all over town. His unique art — colorful, avant-garde, sometimes surreal — didn’t really mesh with what he saw at more traditional galleries. That’s when a friend told him, “If you can’t fit in, then stand out.” So he opened Sirril Art Gallery on the second floor of a 100-year-old building on Main where he sells work of his own and other like-minded artists. Lots of Pritchett’s work is created using paint that glows under a blacklight.
We can never visit Salado without a stop at Fletcher’s Books & Antiques, where one large room of the building is lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases that are all overflowing. More books are stacked on tables throughout the room as well. On this trip, we found a couple of Texas-themed books. “Chance Encounters: True Stories of Unforeseen Meetings, with Unanticipated Results” was written by legendary Texas writer A.C. Greene, and contains stories of his interactions with presidents, athletes, actors, business people and others. The book was signed by Greene’s widow, Judy Greene, in December 2002, eight months after he died on April 5.
The other book we bought was “The Texas Hamburger: History of a Lone Star Icon,” by Rick Vanderpool, which he signed on August 31, 2011, to a fellow named Randy. For the chapter A Miss Texas USA’s Pageant of Texas Hamburgers, Vanderpool asked several women in the Miss Texas USA pageant system to name their favorite burgers in the state. Danielle Doty, who was Miss Texas Teen USA in 2011 and went on to be crowned Miss Teen USA later that year, said that “Health Camp has the best cheeseburger at not only the best price but also is the best size; and it goes great with their chocolate shake.”
As our day was coming to an end, we made a quick stop at the Salado Sculpture Garden, on the north side of town. Situated in a park-like setting, the garden features a rotating collection of work by a diverse group of artists. There are depictions of sunflowers, a big red moose, some human forms and various other creations, as well as a stone labyrinth near the back of the garden for a quiet time of meditation.
