What I look for when I plan my travel is mainly where to go and eat.

For the rest of the itinerary, I’ll just see where the places I want to eat at are and wander around from one place to another, looking at different things along my food trail.

Sourdough bakery is one of the terms I search before my visit to each city.

From my visit to Italy earlier this year, I noticed that good bread became harder to find as I travelled North. Bread in Rome was just fabulous, but other than that I much preferred the sourdough in England.

When I searched for a sourdough bakery in Bologna, Forno Brisa came up, and it looked like something I was looking for. Delicious bread and lengthly-fermented croissants and other viennoiseries. It became one of the top food spots I wanted to visit in Bologna.

But I was moving from one place to another, meeting new hosts everyday. It became quite tricky to go and eat at all the places I wanted to. Not only that other people were (seemingly) not as obsessed with food as I was, and some of them offered to cook for me, which is something I would never say no to, there was so much food I could eat until I get to the point that nothing would fit in my body anymore (the state I experienced almost every day in Italy)

At last, a day before I travelled back to England, I got to visit the bakery to have my second breakfast/first lunch (yes, second lunch followed like two hours later.)


Mid-morning, I walked along the street of Bologna with no hurries, the only plan for today, my last day in this country, was to eat good food. And so I arrived at my destination. A rather modern one-unit bakery with an eye-catching brand identity, created by one of the bakers and founders of this bakery, who was also a graphic designer. On display were endless choices of deliciousness, from gooey dark chocolate brownies with crispy cracking top to flaky, buttery croissants to focaccia with various toppings. It was a hard choice I had to make. At the end, I opted for something savoury, a slice to focaccia topped with fresh cherry tomatoes.


Though that fig and walnut ‘escargot’ was very tempting.

I somehow got talking to Enrico, the friendly guy behind the counter, when he found out about my passion for good sourdough bread and that I also bake sourdough bread in Leeds. After finishing a piece of soft and chewy focaccia, I ended up trying the fig and walnut pastry, which, let me tell you, is a must when you visit this bakery. The dough was flaky and caramelised, and the filling was full-on. Big chunks of walnuts and chopped dried figs, they give you all they have and it was just simply delicious.


Their lunchtime pizzas also looked very mouthwatering, to bad I couldn’t fit in any more food in my little tummy.

Then Enrico told me the short history of this bakery.

Four friends from different parts of Italy came together while they were studying at University of Gastronomical Science, founded by Slow Food organisation. What stye had in common was their love for good bread, which was hard to find in Bologna. So 8 months ago, Forno Brisa was born. They used many different types of local grains sourced from all around Italy, including rye, durum and emmer. I had a quick tour around the bakery and chatted with other bakers at the back, who gave me loads of recommendation (food-wise) I would need to come back and try them all out next time.


And just like that, two hours later, we sort of became friends.

I came back here the next morning, before taking a bus to the airport. Enrico gave me a loaf of emmer bread to bring back to Leeds and let the guys at the bakery try them. The flavour was so sweet and complex it was fascinating to know that the only ingredients in there were flour, water, salt and sourdough starter.


In such a short amount of time and I felt so much sense of belonging, at this bakery and with all these lovely people who welcomed me to their community of good food lover. Not only at the bakery but Bologna itself was so kind to me, or at least all the people I met here were.

That was why I decided to follow my feeling and come back here for my Erasmus exchange semester. As simple and quick as that.

So Bolgona, see you again very soon.