piadina

The piadina is an unleavened flatbread of Romagna, cooked on a heated terracotta disc called a testo and eaten in the strip of Italy between the Apennines and the Adriatic. The name descends from the Latin plàdena, a shallow dish, which itself came from the Greek platys, meaning flat or broad. Medieval Romagnolo dialect carried it as piada, and by the 14th century the word appears in local provisioning and tax records from Forlì and Ravenna.

Giovanni Pascoli, born in San Mauro di Romagna in 1855, wrote the poem La Piada in 1900, calling the flatbread il pane, anzi il cibo dei Romagnoli: the bread, indeed the food, of the Romagnols. Before his romanticization it was peasant sustenance, made from white flour, lard, salt, and water. The testo was heated over embers, and the piada cooked in minutes, soft and faintly charred at the edges.

Commercial production began after the Second World War, when roadside stands called piadinerie started selling the bread stuffed with squacquerone cheese, arugula, and cured meats. By the 1990s, factory-wrapped piadina appeared in supermarkets across Italy. The European Union granted it Protected Geographical Indication status in 2014, formally distinguishing the thicker Riminese style from the thinner version made further west near Forlì.

Today piadina is sold in nearly every Italian city and exported widely. The word has remained stable since Pascoli's time, though dialect forms piada and pjadéina still circulate in villages near Ravenna. Its entry into the global food lexicon came through Italian diaspora communities in Argentina and the United States, where the name became shorthand for any warm flatbread wrap.