The oven of the Pan Venale

Bakery of the "pan venale" in the papal era, meant paid bread; here the panicocolo (baker) did it and sold it, giving it to be sold also in the bread shop and everything was regulated by the Municipality. Its construction in the basement of the thirteenth-century municipal building is ordered by a heading of the reform of September 22, 1406. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as these two ovens did not exist, bread was made in other rooms of the castle or the same municipal palace, where the "Panifacola" (baker) operated under the directives of the two elected massarii in the municipal college, which looked after the asseptum panis secundum valorem grains; but of course it was possible to bake bread even on the hearth of your own home. Furthermore, the distinction must be made between the oven of the venal pan, which makes bread and sells it, and the oven of particulars, the largest one, which cooks bread that housewives carry from home. Il Forno del pan venale was in operation until the years of the First World War and the other until 1953, that is until the death of the last baker who ran it, Mariano Merollini. Until this date the families were going to grind grain to the mill and the housewives made bread at home, warned by Mariano about the time when they had to bring the bread in the oven, for cooking shifts that also began at two in the morning and they continued until noon. It was always Mariano who went at night for the bread to give the alarm to someone, to heat the oven with its own wood, to pay the city fifty lire a year for the rent of the oven, to collect from the housewives the furnace, made now of pennies for each row of bread that had been cooked, now a bit of bread from the cooked one, in an era when not a penny jumped from the bags. When the bread came out of the oven, its scent could be felt throughout the country.