Panificio Fiore: The Famous Bakery in Bari with a 1912 Oven
I walked into the bakery at a moment when there was nothing at all on the counter, and yet there was a line. Everyone was waiting for the same thing: the next focaccia to come out of the oven. When it did, the batch was gone in seconds and I was happily holding my own slice, still hot.
Panificio Fiore is a family bakery in the old quarter of Bari Vecchia, a few steps from the Basilica of San Nicola, where the third generation of the Fiore family bakes focaccia barese, the pride of the Apulian branch of Italian cooking, in a wood-fired oven from 1912.
Three Generations at One Oven
The oven is the main character here, and the oldest member of the family. Giuseppe Fiore built it in 1912, his son Domenico worked it after him - in Bari they called him Mimmo, and also the king of focaccia - and today it is run by his grandson Antonio, who started helping out in the bakery at thirteen. The oven has hardly been switched off since: if it went cold, it would take a day to bring it back up to baking temperature, so the fire keeps going. It is probably the only member of the family that has never taken a vacation. That date is a family claim the Italian press repeats with no archival record to back it up, and nobody disputes it - and even with that date Fiore is not the oldest bakery in town, whatever the guidebooks say. Of Bari's five century-old bakeries, it is only the second oldest.
The second legend is the more romantic one, and it did not hold up either. The bakery supposedly sits in a deconsecrated thirteenth-century Byzantine chapel, and half the travel websites still say so. A renovation uncovered three stone columns with capitals behind the counter, a row of arches and a walled-up portal with a coat of arms and a cross dated to around 1508 - so a little church after all, but a Renaissance one, and not even the experts can say exactly which one. The history looking down on the customers from those walls is three hundred years younger than the story had it.
The Best Focaccia in Italy
Baking focaccia is a competitive sport in Italy: in 2019, at a food fair in Bologna, a jury put the Fiore version up against the Genoese one and declared it the best in the country, and the mayor of Bari then brought Antonio a plaque. Meanwhile the city runs its own endless derby, the Fiore bakery against the Santa Rita bakery, played out on social media with nobody to blow the whistle. I will throw a third name into the mix, the Magda bakery near the station (see Where to Eat in Bari), and I refuse to pick a side.
Alongside focaccia, Fiore sells what Bari eats out of hand: packaged taralli, pizza ready to go, stuffed breads, sweet and savory baked goods that keep for weeks, and dried pasta. Focaccia is sold by weight, wrapped in paper, and eaten at any hour - for breakfast, for lunch, or as the last thing you eat after an evening walk, but the best one is always the one they have just pulled out. Two practical things: on weekdays the bakery closes for a long midday break and reopens in the late afternoon, and there are two bakeries called Fiore in Bari. The one you want is in the old quarter, by the basilica.
A Slice for Two Euros by San Nicola
I bought my focaccia at Fiore at exactly the moment you go there hoping for: a batch had just come out of the oven and the line that had already formed demolished it on the spot. My slice was still hot. The dough was airy, under a thick layer of crushed tomatoes, olives and seasoning, and so much oil that they clearly do not skimp on it here. The bottom crackled, the top stayed soft. It is on the salty side, which does not bother me at all - quite the opposite. The slice cost 2 EUR. I would put it among the best focaccias I have ever eaten. It was perfect. The columns from 1508 behind the counter will wait for me. The focaccia will not.
Panificio Fiore
