Antico Forno Roscioli

Four generations at the oven

Bread comes out as a daily argument for restraint while Pierluigi Roscioli , chef at Antico Forno Roscioli in Rome, keeps the bench close to its inheritance. He heads the bakery on Via dei Chiavari as part of a four-generation line of bakers, a lineage he states without ornament: “I am a baker, and my family and I are four generations that have baked.” For Roscioli, the station is not a chosen costume. “My work was not born; I was born into my work.” The house itself carries an older memory than its modern family stewardship. The oven is tied to a site dating to 1824, while the Roscioli family story here begins in 1972, when Marco Roscioli took over the bakery with Anna. Pierluigi and Alessandro worked with their father from the beginning; Pierluigi later carried Antico Forno forward, while the wider family name moved into other Roman addresses. This is the bakery, not those rooms. Its discipline is bread, pizza al taglio, pizza bianca, supplì, pastries and the morning work that makes Via dei Chiavari smell like an oven before it looks like a counter.

Mother yeast and rough flour

Roscioli’s position on bread is unusually firm because it is not styled as novelty. “Bread is a form of gastronomical expression which I do not think should be altered.” At Antico Forno Roscioli, that conviction sits in the dough: active mother yeast, rough flours, low salt, slow fermentation, and a preference for raw materials that behave like ingredients rather than branding. The bakery describes its bread as the result of 50 years of work on balance, softness, fragrance and digestibility. The method reaches across the case. Pizza bianca depends on the same trust in fermentation and flour; pizza al taglio asks for structure strong enough to hold a cut, a fold, a filling, or a strip eaten standing. Pane di Lariano and pane di Kamut sit beside the quicker pleasures of supplì, fresh bread, baked sweets and savory pieces from the gastronomia. Roscioli has said, “My inspiration comes from always willing to respect the traditional production methods and the raw materials.” The sentence reads like a working rule. The hand follows the material, not the other way around.

The counter on Via dei Chiavari

The room is a bakery first, with a prominent counter and the direct tempo of counter service. Loaves, slabs of pizza and trays of pastry do not need a ceremony around them; they need space to cool, hands to cut them, paper to wrap them, and someone who knows when a crust has settled enough to travel. The atmosphere remains Roman in the useful sense: social, compact, conversational, with local regulars and passersby sharing the same line. Industrial-contemporary details sit around an older function, but the bench leads the room. Bread and pizza fill the street before the customer reaches the glass. Inside, the craft is visible in fragments: a cut of pizza bianca, a tray moved across the pass, a supplì taken while it still carries heat. Nothing asks the visitor to slow down for the sake of theatre. The dough has already taken the long way.

A family oven held in use

The reason Antico Forno Roscioli matters is not that the address has become a stop on a Roman food itinerary, though it has. Its weight comes from continuity kept in production. The bakery still works as a daily oven, with tradition tested by repetition rather than preserved behind glass. If there is a next movement to hold in view, it is the same one the family has chosen for decades: Pierluigi Roscioli keeping bread, pizza bianca and Pane di Lariano at the center of Via dei Chiavari.