We are on holidays for 2 weeks- en route we stopped by one of our favourite stores in Rome, Ortigia on Via Vittoria. Their products, inspired by the perfume of Sicily's flora and Sicilian art, capture a true Sicilian sensibility.

To read a bit more about Ortigia click on the link below to one of our blog posts. Blog posts will be back on July 4th.

A young woman, evocative of  Renato Guttuso’s dark haired beauty in his famous 1970’s painting “La Vucciria,”  walked with a confident air passed the shaded outside tables of  “the salon of Palermo” – Palermo’s  Antico Caffé Spinnato on the pedestrianised Principe di Belmonte.

It was lunch time on a Saturday in early June, the tables were almost full and Spinnato, founded in 1860 the year that Garibaldi chose Sicily as the starting point for the unification of Italy, was animated.

While Polizzi Generosa still sleeps the modern stone wood fired oven at La Sorgente del Pane, a small bakery up off the main street in Piazza Udienza, is fired with dry pieces of olive and citrus wood collected from the pruning of trees just outside the village.

At roughly 4.30am the small cob shaped rounds of soft, elastic like dough laid out the night before and covered on long wooden trays have risen perfectly. The living mother yeast; a guarded ingredient handed down from the baker, Giovanni’s maternal line, and local flours from mills 30 minutes away have produced dozens of loaves ready for baking. The undulating wheat fields around Polizzi have been productive since antiquity and when Giovanni talks of the “metodo antico” he uses; no beer yeast just the living mother yeast, a wood fired oven and local flour, his smile broadens.