Ficini

Stone-milled flour and a live mother yeast

The counter runs the length of the shop and states the case plainly: loaves, focaccia trays, hand-stretched grissini, tarts and biscuits, all of it built on stone-milled flour and live mother yeast. The family bought a small bread shop here in 1976, made it a full artisan bakery in 1988, and added daily sweet and savoury pastry to the nightly bread work in 1999. The flours are minimally sifted, the cereals ancient and non-GMO, the fermentations long, and vero integrale means the whole kernel is milled as it is rather than rebuilt from parts. The long fermentation is what gives the loaves their digestibility and their keeping quality. No lard is used anywhere in production. Gambero Rosso awarded it Tre Pani for 2026.

A Tuscan thread in a San Salvario bakery

The Tuscan side is not decoration. The family carried Altopascio roots north and still bakes pane sciapo, the saltless Tuscan loaf, as a straight homage. The flagship C'era una volta is a two-kilo loaf made with ancient central Italian grains including frasineto and mentana, and it is the clearest single argument for the bread programme. Ficini is also a Maestro del Gusto in Turin, a regional mark for artisan food producers. Three generations have run the shop since 1976, the third taking over at the start of 2026, and in San Salvario it works as a panificio sotto casa: the daily baker for the street, plus catering and event orders. There is no dining room. The choosing happens at the display, and that is the whole experience.

Start with the bread, then work along the counter

Start with the whole-grain and long-fermented loaves, then look for pane sciapo and the large C'era una volta. After bread, the grissini are the Turin move: stirati a mano, including rubatà, plus walnut, rye and soy-granola versions. The savoury end runs to focaccia alla pala, focaccia al padellino, pizza in teglia and seed bars in sunflower, pumpkin and oat. Sweets are crostate, apple cakes and paste secche, with panettoni at Christmas and colombe at Easter. Bread is baked through the night and pastry made during the day, so the counter you walk up to is a snapshot of both shifts at once. Ask what has just come out, because the display shifts through the day.