Prepare ragù in the traditional way, adding peas towards the end of cooking. Boil the pasta al dente, drain it, toss with the meat sauce, diced ham, salami and cheese. Butter a mold (preferably with a hinge), sprinkle it with breadcrumbs and distribute a first layer of seasoned pasta, add the eggs and cover with more pasta. Complete with a generous dose of Grana Padano and breadcrumbs and bake at 180 ° C for 25 minutes. Carry on for another 5 minutes under the grill to form a crispy crust. Remove from the oven, allow to cool, then unmold.
This is how the ancient bread oven, inaugurated during the First World War, was transformed into a museum and, above all, into a new interdisciplinary production center available to artists
Where once the bread to give a shred of hope and nourishment to the people of Bologna, today we try to nourish art in its younger, most unusual, most beautiful forms. In this 2020 certainly far from simple for our artists, the New bread oven of the Emilian capital – within the Mambo, the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna – is renewed once again, transforming itself not only into an exhibition space, but into a real interdisciplinary production site available to a group of creative talents. An important leap for the structure, which thus returns to its origins as a place of preparation, of creation, with art that is metaphorically mixed. And then bread.
Il Forno del Pane (Photo: Cineteca di Bologna Archive)
The history of the building
The building that now houses the MAMbo has its roots up to the early twentieth century. The first section, in particular, was built in 1915 at the behest of the Mayor of Bologna Francesco Zanardi: its original function is that of a municipal bakery and becomes essential during the years of WWI, to ensure the supply of bread to citizens and to calm the prices. In the 1940s, then, the building was expanded to house the Autonomous Consumption Authority, until its final closure in 1958.
Conversely, the transformation of the old bakery into a museum began in the second half of the 1990s. The restoration, designed by Aldo Rossi, aims to recover the structure with the utmost respect for its pre-existing architectural features. When the restoration is complete, the space is distributed over three floors, which house a conference room, a bar-restaurant, a bookshop, an educational department, exhibition rooms and the contemporary art library-newspaper library. But also the Hall of the Chimneys, which still retains the ancient fireplaces of the bakery, and which today is the beating heart of the New Forno del Pane project.
A new space for artistic production
The international explosion of the pandemic due to coronavirus led to an in-depth reflection not only on the possibility of enjoying art, but above all on the nature of the public museum institution, its function, its role for the cities and communities of reference. The Board of Directors of the Bologna Museums Institution, the Department of Culture and Promotion of the city and the related Department of the Municipality of Bologna, as well as the staff of MAMbo and its director Lorenzo Balbi, so they decided for an identity and strategic redefinition of the museum, to be undertaken through the project of the Nuovo Forno del Pane.
The building, therefore, is no longer intended only as a place of artistic enjoyment, but as a interdisciplinary production center in the round: the Sala delle Ciminiere del MAMbo is once again one cooking for the creative community, where art becomes bread for the mind and the museum turns into an oven, an incubator of creativity. A space that Bologna offers its artists to restart, to be reborn after the emergency using beauty and culture as an engine.
The selected artists
The commission chaired by Lorenzo Balbi himself – also responsible for the Modern and Contemporary Art Area of the Bologna Museums Institution, has thus selected 12 artists domiciled in the Metropolitan City of Bologna, which has been assigned a research and production space within the Nuovo Forno del Pane. In particular, these are Ruth Beraha (1986, Milan), Paolo Bufalini (1994, Rome), Letizia Calori (1986, Bologna), Giuseppe De Mattia (1980, Bari), Allison Grimaldi Donahue (1984, Middletown, USA), Bekhbaatar Enkhtur (1994, UlaanBaatar, Mongolia), Eleonora Luccarini (1993, Bologna), Rachele Maistrello (1986, Vittorio Veneto), Francis Offman (1987, Butare, Rwanda), Mattia Pajè (1991, Melzo), Vincenzo Simone (1980, Seraing , Belgium), Filippo Tappi (1985, Cesena).
A decidedly varied selection in profiles – by age and geographic origin, of course, but above all by training and expressive languages - which well represents the new inclinations traced by emerging Italian art. The hope is that the group can find in the daily experience of close comparison a further element of wealth and an opportunity for growth. For themselves, as well as for the whole community.
Forno Tondo is the new bakery in the Isola district in Milan. To open it Silvia Cancellieri, young promise of bread-making
A single showcase, discreet as the character of its owner. The street is also slightly secluded, but along the perimeter of one of the most dynamic areas of Milan. Silvia Cancellieri, after various explorations, eventually chose theIsland to open his Round oven. Born in February with the idea of becoming a neighborhood bakery,it is already a meeting point for the inhabitants of the area. The name chose it because «it is short, easy to remember. But also because it reports to loaf shape and expresses well the sense of cyclicity: of bread, of living processes and, as a woman, I also say of the moon. In fact, as a personal reading, I see in the logo. I like the overall image of femininity .
At school of bread from Verdickt, Longoni and Grazioli
She says it with a touch of pride, she who, as a "stubborn" young woman, chose a profession often still tied to the singular masculine (or at most plural). After a respectable cursus honorum, in which names like Verdickt, Longoni is Grazioli, Silvia managed to land with her small shop on the island: a single, clear environment, with a note of color given by some Ustica tiles, a large wooden table, on which Ligurian focaccias and some Sicilian inspirations rest – in honor of their roots -, a shelf that frames the shapes of bread e a large window with a window, behind which the decisive or delicate movements of his hands on the doughs can be glimpsed.
Forno Tondo, new neighborhood bakery
When Silvia first raised the damper it was the end of February. After a week Milan would have entered a tunnel from which the city, people and the whole world came out decidedly changed. Months in which the bread has become symbol of life and resilience. And the baker's craft he stripped himself of worldliness to return to the essentials. In these three months, his "neighborhood bakery" has become reality without his realizing it.
Milan, on the island the new neighborhood bakery is Tondo and speaks female.
An essential baking idea
"Now the challenge will be to maintain relationships with all those people who found a point of reference in my shop in those strange days." But it won't be difficult, because Silvia knows how to listen and above all because she likes to tell her bread, which is as essential as the idea behind it: "Baking means bringing together the whole chain in something that takes shape in your hands, it means playing with transformation".
Silvia's bread: round, large format, with mother yeast
From this "simplicity", "Which is not the starting point but the arrival point", as stated in the quote that welcomes its clients, was born Silvia's bread: round. Large format. With sourdough is organic stone-ground flours. A honeycomb leavened product, slightly moist and with an imperceptible acidic note. There are the daily classics: the Tonda, a 3 kg form of type 2 soft wheat flour; there is the 1 kg durum wheat semolina bread and the mixed seed bread, also 1 kg. Then, on rotation, there is always a different integral on the shelf, "to try flavors, aromas and textures. This is bringing many customers closer to the idea of wholemeal bread, because everyone finds their own. "
Every day an integral in rotation
The Tuesday is the day of the rye (Piedmont), the Wednesday of the Margherito, a variety of durum wheat (Sicily), the Thursday is located on spelled (Umbria), the Friday it's up to Sicilian evolutionary blend of soft grains, which has a slight licorice aftertaste. And to finish the Saturday there is what Silvia calls the Moro di Sicilia, «A mixture of mainly hard grains, which contains tumminievery dark which give a particular color and crazy aromas . More there is also a special bread every day, enriched with fruit or other ingredients. "That is no longer the daily bread, but a whim."
Bread is certainty, but also research
The choice to have three "classics" and of rotate the others it was dictated by the awareness that bread must be certainty. Customers must be offered a good, stable and pleasing product. To do this you need to know the flours, perhaps use less aromatic and easier to process. But bread is also research. Especially for a girl who graduated in Gastronomic Sciences before being hit by the so-called "bread disease". In the three years of studies he learned a enhance the complexity of the food, to recognize quality not only in the artisan gesture of those who make transformation, but also in the agricultural act of those who cultivate the raw material: "For me, giving value to the supply chains is not only a gastronomic priority, but also an ethical one".
Silvia receives the "Cultivate and Care" award
For all these reasons, Silvia is among the winners of Cultivating and Preserving, aappointment, scheduled until June 27, created by the Ceretto Wineries and the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo to enhance the good practices of the area. Now in its third edition, the theme of this year is bread, a symbol par excellence of the peasant tradition and today also of an ability to make innovation that focuses on the territoriality and sustainability of the entire agri-food chain.
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