The pizza ice cream!

It's the snack that looks like an ice cream cone but tastes like a traditional pizza.

The Konopizza has been invented by an Italian company to cater for those who want the convenience of eating on the move, without making a mess.

It hopes to take a large slice of the fast-food market dominated by hot dogs and hamburgers.

The pizza cornetto was invented by chef Rossano Boscolo and went on sale three weeks ago in the northern Italian city of Bergamo. Costing around £1, it takes three minutes to cook in a special oven designed at Mr Boscolo's training school.

It is available in a variety of flavours, including the classics margherita and capricciosa.

Isabo Rinaldi, a spokesman for the inventor's company, Boscolo Etoile, said a great deal of effort had gone into ensuring that the pizza cornetto did not turn into a messy mass of mozzarella and tomato.

'Mr Boscolo put a lot of study into finding ways to make sure that neither the mozzarella nor the tomatoes released water,' said Miss Rinaldi.

'He has also managed to ensure the dough stays crunchy. The result is that your hands stay clean.'

She said the Konopizza would soon be available in six more outlets in other parts of Italy and that a contract was being signed with a major British company to export it across the Channel.

Miss Rinaldi denied that the prime motivation behind the invention had been to challenge American domination of the industry. 'All that Mr Boscolo did was to take aspects of two quintessentially Italian food products, the pizza and the ice cream, and combine them,' she said.

The origins of pizza are unclear, with Greece, Italy and Mexico all claiming to have invented a version of the dish hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

Most food historians point to Naples as the area of origin and to Napoletana as the archetype of modern pizza.

The word 'pizza', meaning 'pie', appeared for the first time just before 1000 AD, in the area between Naples and Rome.