As I See It: the Italian Baker

  • Flour coated cloths are open and placed in wooden troughs to keep the sticky dough from adhering to the wood.

  • The simple dough is shaped into small round balls, dusted with flour and left to rise on the table before being transferred into wooden troughs.

  • Tending the fire and moving loaves around in the oven. Loaves are taken from the oven when they are crisp. Surprisingly heavy, they are stacked back in the troughs they were risen in to cool before being picked up and sold in stories the next day.

  • As the loaves bake, he rests, breathing in tobacco of the harshest of cigarettes. In the background firewood is stacked along side religious charms and a years-gone-by calender of voluptuous cartoon women.

Tags: As I See It

Each day the same white shirt and light jean overalls. impeccably clean, ready to become freshly dirtied each night. Each day he drives in his small white car to collect branches, which he ties in bundles to his roof, to fuel the last wood burning bread oven in Spoleto, a small town in central Italy. Each day bags of flour and buckets of water are combined, needed, rolled and dusted, lovingly placed in large wooden cradle-like troughs to rest and rise, before they are transported on a large wooden paddle to be goldened and crisped in hot wooden embers of the brick oven. With no language in common, long hours were filled with gestures, shutter clicks and surprisingly comfortable silence.

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Darkroom is the photography, multimedia and photojournalism blog of the Columbia Daily Spectator. Through Darkroom, Spectator hopes to showcase the work of talented photographers in the Columbia community who have not necessarily committed to journalism, but have a passion for honest and compelling storytelling.


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