Once upon a time, in the Morningside neighborhood, a quiet land of porches and flower gardens, a man made Italian ices in a side-street shop.

A perfectionist was Anthony "Tony Chocco'' Ciocca. Fresh kiwi, watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, lemons, pineapple, mango and raspberry went into his ices. He didn't need sugar or artificial flavoring, except for the cherry for some reason, and he wanted you to know it, wanted you taste the treat before you bought it.

"Watch out,'' Tony Chocco would say. "There are seeds in there.''

He wasn't kidding. Even now, almost two months after his death at 63, his shop on Greenwood Street carries the scents of his craft.

"Tony was the only one who knew how to make it,'' says his brother, Johnny "Chocco'' Ciocca, 50. "He didn't want help.''

The recipe died with him, agreed the men seated round the table in Vento's Pizza in East Liberty the other day. These men grew up with him back in the day when Larimer Avenue was Pittsburgh's Little Italy, and they know they will not see his like again.

"He was just like a piece of the earth out here,'' Anthony "Herb" Amen, 64, said.

Mr. Ciocca began his trade more than 30 years ago in a storefront on Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield. He'd learned the craft from his Uncle Tony, his mother Gilda's brother, a chef in New York City, and he came home to sell the ethnic treat all over Pittsburgh.

His shop would move from Bloomfield to Lawrenceville to Morningside, but he never tied himself to one place. On pretty spring and summer days like the ones we've enjoyed this week, Mr. Ciocca would take his "Anthony's Original Italian Ice" cart with the multicolored umbrella to Clemente Park on the North Shore, or to the entrance to Highland Park, or to the Flynn Parklet on the corner of North St. Clair and Bunkerhill streets down the hill from the big park, where many left bouquets when they heard he had died.

"Coomp,'' his younger brother told me, "he used to have the squirrels come eat out of his hand.''

They preferred pistachio nuts to ices, by the way.

Mr. Ciocca would make his ices the first thing each morning, returning to the shop at dusk to work into the night, with neighborhood people knowing they could buy the ices in bulk then. He'd put in 16-hour days, taking special care with the tricky process of creating the striped ices of two flavors.

Hearing the stories, you could miss the man without ever having met him.

He'd donate ices to Children's Hospital and the bazaar at St. Rafael. Mr. Ciocca provided lemon ices for the nurses at Shadyside Hospital when his brother was there, and the Alvino brothers, Rich and "Fritz,'' told me Mr. Ciocca walked Rich down the halls of that hospital, even hand-fed him, when he was there with an injury.

When Mr. Ciocca's funeral procession left St. Rafael Church in March, all the cars made a right on Greenwood so they could pass the store one last time before heading to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Penn Hills. The shop window is now filled with Mass cards sent by the people who loved him, and the walls inside are covered with the photos of family and friends he kept around him as he worked.

Pittsburgh lost a treasure, a man who sweetened the summers of thousands, many of whom never knew his name, but some of whom would say, "Let's go see if Tony's up there'' and maybe bring a lawn chair to while away the better part of an afternoon.

Now such moments will exist only in memory. The only thing that's sure now is that it they will last, for decades more at least, as long as any kid who ever stood there struggling with the choice between a lemon or a cherry can taste the life work of "Tony Chocco."