Loaf of Bread

The hundreds of loaves of bread in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, that we have purchased in more than thirty countries over the years, is not always the greatest, but it's always been very eatable. The bread pictured here is a particular loaf we have purchased in Italy a dozen times at least. Often the crust is hard, the loaf is hollow, and given some drum sticks, we could lead a parade.

Sometimes it seems we accumulate two loaves of stale bread for each new loaf we buy, so Emmy is known to ducks and swans all over Europe as the “Stale Bread Lady.” If it weren’t for all those consumers, our RV would soon be overburdened with bags of fusty, musty, moldy baguettes, brótchen, and ciabatta. (Otherwise known as pan, pain, Brot, pane, Brood, pão, brød, bröd, leipä, and other words in other languages, but it always smells delicious!)

As an example of what can happen with bread, many times in several countries we watched as Grandma entertained her Grandkids by feeding bread to the pigeons. In Bologna, Italy’s Piazza Maggiore, right in front of Basilica of St. Petronius, Grandma had a large bag filled with dinner rolls that must have been a few days old. She would toss a roll into the air a few feet from where she stood, and as the roll landed on the cobble-stones it would explode into a million pieces, and spread over a large area for the birds to eat. Amazing!