6 books like Love & Gelato, from To All the Boys I've Loved Before to Since You've Been Gone: sweet YA romances with travel, summer, and self-discovery.
Updated June 10, 2026
Jenna Evans Welch's Love & Gelato works because the romance is only half the story. Lina is sent to Tuscany for the summer after her mother dies, reluctantly reads the journal her mother kept there years earlier, and pieces together a family secret while falling for a boy named Ren and eating a great deal of gelato. The grief plot gives the sunshine something to push against, and the Florence setting is rendered lovingly enough that the book doubles as a travel daydream. It is a gentle, clean YA romance with an actual mystery driving it forward.
The books below split along what readers usually want next. If it was the fate-and-serendipity romance, Jennifer E. Smith owns that lane with The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight and The Geography of You and Me, and Nicola Yoon's The Sun Is Also a Star compresses it into a single day in New York. If it was the warm, character-driven sweetness, Jenny Han's To All the Boys I've Loved Before and Sandhya Menon's When Dimple Met Rishi deliver that. And if it was the summer of stepping outside your comfort zone, Morgan Matson's Since You've Been Gone is the closest structural match, list of tasks and all.
One honest note: none of these is set in Italy. If the Italian setting specifically is what you loved, Welch's own follow-ups (Love & Luck in Ireland, Love & Olives in Greece) keep the formula and the European backdrop. Everything below trades the setting for the feeling.
The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight
by Jennifer E. Smith
Read this if the whirlwind, right-place-right-time romance was your favorite part.
Jennifer E. Smith's novel is built on the same engine as Love & Gelato: a girl traveling somewhere she does not want to go, family grief waiting at the destination, and a boy who makes the trip mean something else entirely. Hadley misses her flight to London for her father's wedding by four minutes, meets Oliver in the airport, and the two spend the overnight flight talking. Like Lina, Hadley is working through complicated feelings about a parent while the romance unfolds, and the book treats both threads as equally important.
The difference is compression. Where Love & Gelato unspools over a whole Tuscan summer, this takes place in roughly twenty-four hours, so it reads fast and leans harder on the idea of fate. There is no mystery plot and no journal to decode; the emotional work is all about Hadley forgiving her father. Pick this when you want the swoon and the serendipity in a single sitting, and do not mind trading Florence for Heathrow and London.
Read this if you want the connection-across-distance version of the same feeling.
Smith's other entry here starts with a meet-cute (Lucy and Owen get stuck in an elevator during a New York City blackout) and then does something Love & Gelato never has to: it separates its couple. Lucy moves to Edinburgh, Owen drifts west across America, and the romance survives on postcards and the question of whether one good night can carry two people across continents. The travel element Love & Gelato readers respond to is everywhere in this book; both characters are figuring out who they are by moving through new places.
It is quieter and more melancholy than Love & Gelato, with no central secret and no big reveal, just two parallel coming-of-age stories that keep almost reconnecting. Some readers find the long-distance structure romantic and others find it frustrating, since the couple spends most of the book apart. Choose it if you liked watching Lina grow into a new place at least as much as you liked the kissing.
Read this if you want the sweetest, most beloved romance in this lane.
Jenny Han's novel shares Love & Gelato's foundation: private writing made suddenly, mortifyingly public. Where Lina inherits her mother's journal, Lara Jean's secret love letters get mailed to the boys they were written about, and the fallout forces her into a fake relationship that turns real. Both books are also quietly about family and an absent mother; Lara Jean's mother has died before the story begins, and the Song sisters' closeness gives the book the same warm, grounded core that Lina's family mystery gives hers.
This is a contemporary high school story, so there is no travel and no European backdrop, and the comfort here comes from baking, sisterhood, and Lara Jean's homebody voice rather than from gelato and Renaissance art. It is also the start of a trilogy with a hugely popular Netflix adaptation, so if it lands, you have two more books waiting. Pick it when you want the gentle, clean romance feeling and do not need a plane ticket attached.
Read this if the summer-of-becoming-braver arc mattered more than the romance.
Morgan Matson's novel is the closest structural cousin to Love & Gelato on this list. Lina follows a dead mother's journal through Florence; Emily follows a vanished best friend's list of thirteen dares through a New Jersey summer (kiss a stranger, skinny-dip, ride a horse). In both books, a document left behind by someone who is gone pushes a shy girl out of her shell, and the romance (here a sweet slow burn with a boy named Frank) grows out of the tasks rather than replacing them. The mystery of why Sloane disappeared keeps pages turning the way Lina's family secret does.
The grief is lighter here, since Sloane is missing rather than dead, and the book is more about friendship than family. It is also longer and more leisurely than Love & Gelato, a true hammock book, with playlists between chapters and a strong summer-nights atmosphere. If Lina's transformation was the part you loved, this is the best version of that arc in YA, and the most common answer to what to read next.
Read this if you want the cultural texture with a funnier, sparkier romance.
Sandhya Menon's romantic comedy gives you what the Italian setting gave Love & Gelato, a romance steeped in a specific culture, here Indian-American family life rather than Tuscan summers. Dimple wants a coding career and no part of the marriage her parents hope for; Rishi, the boy those parents have quietly arranged for her to meet at a summer program, is a hopeless romantic who believes in the tradition. The summer-program setting does the same work as Lina's Florence trip, putting two strangers in a new place with time to fall for each other.
This is an enemies-to-lovers comedy with dual points of view, so it is louder and more banter-driven than Welch's gentle, grief-tinged book, and there is no mystery thread at all. The conflict comes from ambition and family expectation instead of a hidden past. Pick it when you want the lightest book on this list, and a heroine considerably pricklier and funnier than Lina.
Read this if fate and destiny were the part you underlined.
Nicola Yoon's novel takes the idea Love & Gelato flirts with, that the universe puts the right people in your path, and makes it the entire architecture of the book. Natasha, a science-minded girl whose family is hours from being deported to Jamaica, meets Daniel, a Korean-American poet on his way to a college interview, and the novel follows their one day in New York while cutting away to the strangers whose small choices keep nudging them together. Like Love & Gelato, it balances a swoony romance against a genuinely heavy situation, and the question of whether love can be a matter of hours hangs over every chapter.
It is a more ambitious and more bittersweet book than Love & Gelato, with alternating narrators, interludes from side characters, and an ending that does not tie a neat bow. The deportation stakes give it a weight Welch never reaches for. Choose it when you are ready for the romance to cost something, and know that it won a Printz Honor and was a National Book Award finalist for a reason.
If you want the same author and the same travel-romance formula, Jenna Evans Welch wrote two companion novels: Love & Luck, set in Ireland and featuring Lina's friend Addie, and Love & Olives, set in Santorini. If you want a different author, Since You've Been Gone by Morgan Matson is the closest match in structure and feeling, with a summer list pushing a shy heroine out of her comfort zone.
Is Love & Gelato part of a series?
It is the first of three standalone companion novels by Jenna Evans Welch. Love & Luck (2018) follows a character from the first book on a trip through Ireland, and Love & Olives (2020) moves to Greece with a new heroine. They share a tone and a travel premise rather than a continuous plot, so they can be read in any order. Love & Gelato was also adapted into a Netflix film in 2022.
Are these books appropriate for younger teens?
Mostly yes. Love & Gelato, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, When Dimple Met Rishi, and the Jennifer E. Smith books are all on the sweeter, cleaner end of YA romance. Since You've Been Gone includes mild partying and dares like skinny-dipping. The Sun Is Also a Star is the most mature in theme, dealing with deportation and a less tidy ending, though it is still squarely YA.
Which of these books is most like Love & Gelato's Italy setting?
None of the six is set in Italy, which is why Welch's own Love & Luck and Love & Olives are the best bets for the European travel feeling specifically. Among this list, The Geography of You and Me travels the most, moving between New York, Edinburgh, and the American West, and The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight delivers the trip-abroad romance with its London setting.
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