Nel Nome del Pane Cappelletti & Bongiovanni

Naturally leavened loaves built on pasta madre and stone-milled organic flour are what this Dovadola forno has traded on for more than forty years. The name translates as “In the Name of Bread”, and the counter takes it at face value.

Ancient grains, sourdough and a family forno

Nel Nome del Pane Cappelletti & Bongiovanni begins in 1979, when the Cappelletti family took on an existing forno in Dovadola and turned it into an operation devoted to bread made with grain quality and fermentation at the centre. More than forty-five years later it has grown from a local Romagna bakery into a recognised name for organic, ancient-grain breadmaking, still family-run.

The doughs are built around pasta madre, certified organic wholegrain flours, stone milling, ancient wheat varieties and km0 sourcing from nearby growers. Gambero Rosso has placed the bakery among its “3 Pani” awardees for eight consecutive years, which sets it alongside Italy’s better-known artisan bread bakeries rather than the everyday village forno it started as.

The shop counter and the bread-focused identity

The Dovadola shop is the public-facing retail point, with the laboratory and office nearby handling production. That separation keeps the visit focused on choosing bread and baked goods at a counter rather than on any restaurant format.

The wider business runs a store and lab in Forlimpopoli and takes the bread to regional markets in Ravenna, Ferrara and Lugo, so the Dovadola counter sits inside a Romagna network rather than working as a one-off display case. Its community role rests on certified organic ingredients, natural fermentation and long relationships with the local producers who make the km0 approach possible.

Order with the bread in mind

Begin with the bread programme: naturally leavened loaves made with pasta madre, organic wholegrain and stone-milled flours, ancient varieties and local wheat where the short supply chain applies. That is the reason the bakery has a reputation beyond its own valley.

The range then extends past pane into pizze, focacce, pizzette, biscotti, torte and castagnaccio, so a good order can hold both a core loaf and a smaller savoury or sweet bake. Focacce and pizze cover the rustic flatbread side, while pizzette work as single snacks from the same tradition. On the sweet side, castagnaccio is the most specific regional cue, a chestnut-flour cake tied to the late-autumn chestnut season in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, with biscotti and torte filling out the homestyle end of the counter. The point is not range for its own sake but a coherent set of bakes built on organic grain and slow fermentation.