About us
Our story
CASE MARCAPANE is an experience closely connected with nature. It was born to bring back to life a place that had been left abandoned for years, through the poetry of a communal oven that was once a place of warmth, fragrance and life.
In these houses, symbols, traditions and tools have shaped the history of this place and of our community. Telling this story means bringing our memories back to life and enriching our present.
The story of the communal oven
Before leaving home for the communal oven, every good housewife had to mark her bread with a sign: a mark made with a fork or with a special stamp, the “marcapane”. It was the family seal, a sign that made her bread easy to recognise among all the others.
When the oven was ready, a little trumpet would sound, so that the housewives living nearby knew the oven was hot and they could put their bread in. At once the streets filled with the women who tended the oven, crossing the courtyards with a wooden board balanced on their heads, laden with the shaped loaves. The oven filled up with all kinds of bread in different shapes – round, ring-shaped, long – topped with sesame seeds (“giuggiolena”) or poppy seeds (“paparina”). Each one bore a different mark: marks of the people, of the work and dedication of an entire community. The oven became a place for meeting and sharing, because while waiting for the bread to bake just right, people exchanged words, flours, skills and knowledge.
And when at last it was ready, the smell of freshly baked bread mingled with that of burning wood filled all the nearby courtyards, giving the air a strong sense of the sacred.
Bread: a sacred symbol of family, of unity, of sharing and sacrifice. The symbol of a community. This is why we chose this place.
An exclusive place to stay, a place to build relationships, to meet people and live new experiences, where you can knead bread with your own hands, pick almonds and make “pane cunzatu”, the traditional Sicilian dressed bread.
It is a place in constant transformation, changing with the contribution of the people who take part in it and with the knowledge of the local area. A network of relationships between those who sow the wheat, those who mill the flour, those who make the oil to dress the bread and those who live here.
For us, building is a sustainable practice: it means restoring what already exists, not pursuing the concreting-over of the land that damages the environment and biodiversity. And innovating means rethinking a historical and cultural heritage that we believe is well worth telling.
We support our farming economy and our local businesses, born from the experience of past generations. Because we know our town, and we want it to become an exchange of knowledge, shared practices and ecological sustainability. We want it to be a direct exchange with the natural world.
Case Marcapane (by B&B Dab’s) is the historic centre coming back to life, offering an exclusive stay in a magnificent setting, where you can enjoy the fragrance of local produce and the genuine wisdom and history of a community.