The Story of Mattei’s Biscotti di Prato, Known as “Mattonella”

This is how the shopfront on Via Ricasoli must have appeared to passersby in the late 1930s, as captured in this watercolor by S. Musso:

The large hand-painted wooden sign, and the wide window filled with Mattei specialties — almond Biscotti di Prato, Mantovane, and candied loaves

Here you can see the ground floor plan of the shop and the adjoining bakery, with its wood-fired ovens. Until the mid-1950s, everything was still baked in wood-fired ovens, and each loaf of biscotti was sliced entirely by hand.

 The person entrusted with this delicate task was Alfonso Piccioli. In the cover photo: Alfonso Piccioli in the foreground, Alberto Pandolfini (brother of my grandfather Ernesto), and in the background Vitaliano, handing them the loaves of biscotti still warm from the oven.

After the war, almond Biscotti di Prato were still a luxury not within everyone’s reach. Marco Meoni — a friend of ours, pasta maker in Montemurlo — remembers a story told by his father, who as a child lived near the end of Via Santa Trinita. When he was little, he would come to the Biscottificio to buy “Bricioli” (crumbs). Alfonso, behind the counter, would fold a sheet of parchment paper into a cone, then open a drawer of the old shop cabinet, scoop up the crumbs inside, pour them into the cone, twist it shut, weigh it, and hand it over. The boy would leave his coins on the counter and run off, happy with his small warm treasure: the Bricioli. 

And crumbs they really were!
The crumbs that fell during cutting were gathered with the blade and pushed aside into a container — which was nothing more than one of the shop’s wooden drawers. At reopening time, the drawer would be slid back into place, ready for the delight of those children and grown-ups who could not afford the whole almond biscotti.

P.S. Today they are called scraps, broken pieces, or bruciatini (the slightly burnt ends) — a delicacy for just a few, available only at our shop in Prato..

Letizia Pandolfini