Forno Sammarco

Bread as the expression of the earth

Forno Sammarco has been baking in San Marco in Lamis since 1961, a family bakery in the Gargano hills where bread is treated as the maximum expression of the earth rather than a product line. Antonio Cera carries that work now, and he has been central to a new Apulian culture of bread built on the same idea. The house language is agricultural: fields, grains, seasons, raw materials, time, and the people who handle them. Its partnership with Grani Futuri, the international bread movement, sets the frame around sustainable agriculture, grain biodiversity, nutritional quality and a bread culture that carries the story of a territory. Manual work is treated here as a cultural act, not a shortcut nobody got around to eliminating.

A rustic bakery with an experimental streak

The rustic character sits beside real laboratory work, on yeasts, flours and processes, and the results show up as named products rather than vague craft language. Pane F'orma is the central loaf, made in versions with soft wheat and lievito madre, hard wheat, whole grain, seeds, Senatore Cappelli wheat and potatoes. The f'orma oronero uses grano arso, burnt wheat flour, with seeds. The bakery also makes pane su misura for Italian restaurants and special events. Panterrone pushes the idea furthest as an earth panettone made with soft wheat in twenty variants, including Celline di Nardò olives, IGP citrus from the Gargano, black pork salami, lampascioni, almonds and figs. Dita are long, hand-modelled taralli flavoured with wild fennel, Baladin beer, forest potatoes, wild thyme, Senatore Cappelli hard wheat and stone-ground soft wheat.

What to carry home

The sweet side fills in the rest of the picture. Spicci are dessert biscuits made with selected raw materials such as limone femminello del Gargano IGP or Bourbon vanilla beans from Madagascar, equally suited to breakfast or the end of a meal. Mandorlini are the house cantucci, enriched with pistachio, almonds or chocolate gems, fragrant and lifted by a light note of lemon. Around them sit pizze dai sapori antichi, ricotta biscuits, traditional Pugliese sweets and scaldatelli, with Palummella arriving as the Easter lievitato. The reputation travels well beyond the town: La Cucina Italiana named Panterrone the only original pastry-sector creation of 2014, and it later ranked first in Gambero Rosso's 2017 list of vegan panettoni. The bakery has also represented Puglia at Expo Dubai and baked for a Dolce&Gabbana Alta Moda dinner in 2021.