Forno Sammarco: back to manual job

30 March 2015

Bread, love and great storytelling. A chat with Antonio Cera, manager of Forno Sammarco.

In Italy we use to say that every small town, even village, has got its bell tower. This old common saying means that you can find extraordinary and valuable things in every hometown and that finding a treasure is a very ordinary thing in Italy.

Even San Marco in Lamis, a small town on the Gargano hills, has got a treasure: the bread, made by a creative bakery called Sammarco. A genuine laboratory where bread is loved and looked after like in a boutique, mixing the tradition of the territory, familiar history, and manual labour with new innovative recipes. Moreover, Forno Sammarco is a special place where upcicled materials are brought to new life (take a look at the picture above).

“Our customer is invited to join a path, a narrative path” said Antonio Cera, the enterpreuneur baker managing Sammarco. “Our mission is to educate people about the great history of bread, telling them an history about Gargano, our territory, and our family.” In fact, every product of Sammarco has a story and a philosophy behind. Like Panterrone, the first innovation of the traditional panettone after the XIX century.

The taste and the special mixture of raw materials of Panterrone is about the end of WW2 and the beginning of the 50’s, the Italian economic boom. The transition from hunger to the possibility of wealth is represented by the burn wheat flour (a kind of flour used during the war, and nowadays very appreciated by the ‘slowfoodies’), mixed up with seeds (the hope for a generous harvest), and with fig and muscat of Alexandria (the pleasure of wealth).

For further informations on Forno Sammarco, click here.