Seattle-Perugia Sister City Association

Umbria Eats: The Incredible Diversity of Italian Bread

General DeGaulle, or so the joke goes, often despaired of his countrymen’s diversity. “How can you expect,” he queried, “to govern a country that produces over 200 different kinds of cheese?”  In Italy, the astonishing regional creation of  distinctive breads over the centuries—fully 208 different kinds  documented by the Slow Food Movement-- suggests that  Italians may be equally diverse and equally, if not more, ungovernable.  How this amazing range of breads in Italy was collapsed during the transatlantic passage to America, so to speak, into the lone, generic loaf of “Italian bread” served  hot in restaurants everywhere, seems just short of —is it hyperbole to suggest it?--  a national tragedy.  Sadly, this is the only “Italian” bread most Americans will ever experience.

Bread has graced Italian tables since the second century B.C., when Macedonian prisoners, transformed into master bakers (the Macedonians had been eating bread for some time), introduced Rome to bread and the art of baking. Over the centuries, bread evolved into the indispensible Italian foodstuff, and shortages gave rise to innumerable popular revolts, emblemized by the attack on the bakers described in Manzoni’s famous novel, I Promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”).

From Abruzzo to Umbria, you can savor fragrant loaves of many shapes, grains (wheat, rye, oats, barley, millet, corn, spelt, faro and buckwheat) and textures. Tuscany, far and away the country’s “bread-winner,” boasts a staggering 22 varieties of breads, followed by Sicily and the Piedmont region (16 each) and Calabria (14).  The Valle d’Aosta and the Trentino lie at the opposite end of the spectrum, with a “meager” showing of 3 and 4 breads respectively.  Umbria produces 7 breads, a bit shy of the national average of 11-12.  (That’ll give you more time to explore other foods.) I’ll take a brief look below at what makes each of the breads of Umbria distinctive. If you are headed to Perugia, you might begin your bread odyssey with a visit before the lunchtime rush to the bakery called Ceccarani, in the Piazza Matteotti, next to the mini-Coop, where I have in the past found several of the breads described here.