Palermo's own baked flatbread is a bakery and street product with no restaurant form, and the city has no entry in the world's pizza hundred. Is Palermo a pizza city under this guide's definition — or the city that proves the definition needed the bakery counter?
Italy · 6 spots selected · last checked 2026-09-18
Palermo is this guide's clearest test of whether it means what it says about the bakery counter and the cart. Sfincione — high, spongy, oiled, dressed with tomato, onion, anchovy, caciocavallo and breadcrumb — is sold from panifici, from friggitorie and from three-wheeled lapini in the street, and has no restaurant form at all. A guide that recorded only pizzerias would record Palermo as nearly empty. Alongside it, and separately, a small contemporary scene has appeared in the last decade built on Sicilian durum wheat.
Ammodo is the Palermo address where the city's two pizza traditions are priced side by side: Daniele Vaccarella's menu runs six named doughs built on Sicilian durum (Russello, Tumminia, bianco madonita) and live lievito madre, and the antipasti carry a sfincione bagherese at 12 euro among the round pizzas. Vincenzo Pagano's 2024 review sets out each dough in the pizzeria's own words and records the oven as an open-mouth electric Moretti Neapolis. Vaccarella came to his own place after the research he had been doing since 2010 on slow maturation, lievito madre and ancient grains, work that a 2018 PalermoToday report describes while La Braciera's owner Antonio Cottone is quoted calling him 'il nostro Daniele Vaccarella'.
Archestrato di Gela is the clearest case in Palermo of pizza being a programme rather than a dish: Edoardo Chifari's project opened as a restaurant in 2015, added pizza in 2016, and since July 2018 closes at lunch and serves pizza only in the evening, each one named after a district or contrada of Gela. His son Pierangelo runs the dough. Davide Visiello, who lives and writes in Palermo, records the current main dough as 70 per cent tipo 1 flour and 30 per cent evolutionary flour; the house moved to Molino Quaglia's Petra line after testing it. Forbes Italia's first Maestri della Pizza selection, in May 2026, names Pierangelo Chifari among thirty-five, which is the most recent confirmation that he is still at the oven.
This is the Palermo forno with the most specific dough evidence of the seven bakeries the city's sfincione round-up names. Ottavio Guccione came to bread through his wife's family trade in Trapani, opened in Palermo, and rebuilt the recipes around stone-ground traditional Sicilian flours and ancient Sicilian grains with lievito madre, taking out lard for olive oil and white sugar for raw cane; the pizza is leavened twenty-four hours. Its sfincione is made in both the tall classic form and a lower one on pizza dough. Gambero Rosso's Pane e Panettieri d'Italia 2025 gave the bakery Tre Pani, which is standing rather than examination and is cited as such.
Graziano is the Palermo bakery that three separate guides reach for first on sfincione, and the one with a named succession behind the counter. Francesco Graziano took the family firm over in 1999 when his father Salvatore died, and told Cronache di Gusto that he deliberately keeps the recipes as they were conceived in the 1960s, sourcing aged caciocavallo palermitano, tuma and primosale rather than innovating the pizza; the bakery bakes continuously and reaches 600 kilos on a Monday. The sfincione is the piece the house makes for the Immacolata on 8 December, which in Palermo is the day the city eats it.
Porzio is the first fully certified organic bakery in Palermo and, by its own account, in Sicily, and it makes both the Palermitan red sfincione and the white bagherese one with organic ricotta and tuma. The family is named and the succession is documented: Salvatore Porzio founded the firm in 1960 in via Terrasanta, his daughter Rosaria, a biologist, took it on with her husband Antonio, and their son Francesco Coco runs it today and works in the laboratory himself. The grains are named - Timilia, Perciasacchi, Russello, Kamut and organic Sicilian durum - and lard and chemical additives have been removed, which is unusually specific for a Palermo forno.
Mistral is the Palermo pizzeria that has been making the same napo-siciliana pizza for forty years, and the third place in this set to sell sfincione from a round-pizza menu - here in both the Palermitan and the white versions, at 8 and 9 euro. Vincenzo Pagano records the dough precisely: direct dough, tipo 00 flour, 65 per cent hydration, worked in the Neapolitan manner, with 20 per cent Sicilian durum added - a Sicilian habit he notes younger pizzaioli have been dropping. Ron Garofalo was hauling flour from Naples when he started in the early 1980s, and he sat on the technical jury of the 2018 Sanlorenzo Mercato sfincione contest, which is the trade in Palermo treating him as an authority on it.