Millions of visitors attended the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, where technological, cultural, and culinary innovations from around the world were showcased. It was there that one of summer's most recognizable symbols gained worldwide popularity. According to the best-known version of the story, an ice cream vendor ran out of bowls during the fair. A neighboring Syrian pastry seller, Ernest Hamwi, came to the rescue by rolling one of his thin waffle-like pastries, known as zalabia, into a cone that could hold the ice cream. The edible container proved to be an immediate success, offering a practical and inexpensive solution. Historians, however, point out that edible containers for ice cream predated the fair. Italian immigrant Italo Marchiony, originally from the Veneto region, had already devised a method of serving ice cream and granita in edible pastry cups and received a U.S. patent in December 1903. Marchiony developed the idea to eliminate the cost of replacing the fragile glass cups used by New York street vendors. For this reason, many food historians credit him with inventing the edible ice cream container, while recognizing that the St. Louis World's Fair played the decisive role in making it internationally popular. Today, the ice cream cone is enjoyed around the globe and remains one of the universal symbols of summer.