One of the most perplexing and, often, disappointing discoveries when visiting central Italy—including Umbria and vast swaths of Lazio, Tuscany, and Le Marche—is the bread. You sit down for your first meal at a postcard-perfect trattoria and reach into the bread basket expecting a slice of “Italian bread”: a thick, baguette-type loaf with a chewy, flavorful crumb and a crisp aromatic crust.

Instead, you come up with a rather dismaying slice of “pane comune” (also known as “pane sciapo”): a saltless loaf with a dense, dry crumb and crust tough enough to take out the roof of your mouth for days. Though this may seem like blasphemy to the uninitiated, pane comune is a staple in the diets of Italians who have populated the Apennine mountains of central Italy for millennia, and is no less traditional than the what the rest of the world identifies as Italian bread.