Perrone Bakery: A Family Bakery in Matera Since 1890
Panificio Perrone, known in Matera as Il Forno di Gennaro, is a family bakery where bread, focaccia and tray pizza have been baked since 1890 and where most of what is on the counter is sold by weight - nothing unusual in Italian cuisine, but in Matera this is a name everybody knows.
Who Gennaro Is and Why the Name Stuck
The bakery was founded by Nicola Perrone, his son Giuseppe carried it on, and from the 1940s it was run by his grandson Gennaro - the man who gave the place the name people in Matera use, Gennaro's oven. The nickname caught on so completely that the family eventually put it on the sign and on the website. Today the bakery is run by Gennaro's daughters, the fourth generation at the same oven, and they keep the name, because in a southern Italian town a business is named after the person the neighbors know personally. Perrone, after all, is a common southern surname, so the nickname will get you there more reliably than the company name.
An Oven for the Neighbors in the Sassi
The Sassi cave dwellings had no chimneys, so for centuries nobody in Matera baked at home. Women carried their risen dough to communal ovens, and to keep the loaves from getting mixed up in one oven, every family had its own wooden stamp with their initials, pressed into the dough; the stamps were also given as wedding presents, and today you can see them in the town museum. Nicola Perrone stepped into that system as a private stand-in for the communal oven: as the family tells it, he collected dough from the neighbors and baked it in his own wood-fired oven. The era of communal ovens ended in 1952, when a special law moved some 17,000 people out of the Sassi into new districts; the bakery eventually followed them up to the new town, to Via Nazionale. The dates come from the bakery's own website and nobody has ever checked them independently.
What Perrone Bakes and How You Buy It
Bread is the backbone: pane di Matera from durum wheat semolina, a tall horn-shaped loaf with a thick crust and a yellow crumb, leavened with a starter made from macerated fruit and baked in a wood-fired oven. It has carried the European IGP mark since 2008, and Perrone is one of the four historic bakeries in the consortium that guards it, along with Fratelli De Palo. Next to the bread sits focaccia, and here it is only fair to say that Matera never invented one of its own: the local fucuazza is a cousin of the focaccia barese from Bari, sixty kilometers away, just with tomato sauce instead of hand-crushed fresh tomatoes, and the tray pizza, cut and weighed, is a late-1950s import from Rome. Taralli and friselle are eaten all over the south; only the almond strazzate are genuinely Lucanian. What is really Materan about the selection is mostly who bakes it, and for how long.
You buy by weight: you point at a tray, say how much you want, and they cut your piece and weigh it. You buy focaccia here the way we buy salami at the deli counter back home, which is why you can take a piece from three different trays instead of one full portion from a single one. There are a few seats inside, and if you ask, they will warm your food up. The bakery stands outside the Sassi on an ordinary street where locals do their shopping; the only tourists who end up here are the ones who know where to go.
A Piece from Three Different Trays
This is my favorite bakery in Matera (see Where to Eat in Matera). I took a piece from several trays - focaccia with grilled pepper, bits of meat and basil, and something else from the display case on top of that - and instead of eating it out on the street, I sat down inside. They are not used to tourists here, and they tried all the harder to make me welcome; you might even get a small sweet thrown in with your purchase, on the house. The pepper was sweet, the oil-soaked dough was soft, and only the edges, baked almost black, were crunchy - and on a tray focaccia those are the best part. I didn't keep the receipt, so I can't tell you the price. I remember that warmed-up piece in the February cold well enough anyway.
Panificio Perrone (Il Forno di Gennaro)
