Pane di Matera IGP: registered in 2008

Pane di Matera has been an IGP since Commission regulation 160¹/2008, published in the EU Official Journal on February 22, 2008, in the category of bread, pastry, cakes, confectionery and biscuits.

What the 2008 act says

The regulation is number 160¹/2008 of the European Commission, reference L 48/27 in the Official Journal of February 22, 2008. It files the bread under bakery, pastry, confectionery and biscuit products.

The route to it was quiet. The application was published for objections on June 9, 2007, and no one filed one.

The act was read directly, and the agriculture ministry's list confirms the registration date, so the dates here have a primary source behind them.

What it leaves to the specification

No recipe detail is published here, because the product specification, the disciplinare, wasn't opened for this page. The recipe, the shape and the loaf sizes all live in that document.

So you won't find the flour, the leavening or the weight of a loaf below. The descriptions that circulate may well be right, but none of them rests on a document we've read, and a bread page that guesses is worse than one that says so.

Two breads, two schemes

Pane di Altamura, from Puglia, is a DOP registered on July 19, 2003; Pane di Matera, from Basilicata, is an IGP registered in 2008. Each is the flagship product of its region on the agriculture ministry's list, updated June 11, 2026.

The two letters differ for a reason. A DOP and an IGP tie a product to its place with different strictness, and the two breads sit under different rules even when one trip takes in both.

You'll also read that Altamura's was the first DOP bread in Europe. That line circulates widely and wasn't verified on a primary source, so it stays a claim, not a fact.

If you're combining the two areas, the 7 days in Puglia and Matera itinerary passes through both regions.

Basilicata's other registered name

The ministry's list gives Basilicata a second name worth knowing: Peperoni di Senise IGP, the dried peppers called cruschi, registered on July 2, 1996.

That makes the bread the region's flagship on the list, and the peppers the older registration by twelve years.

Buying it in Matera

No list of certified bakeries is published in any source we hold, so the practical test is the label: look for Pane di Matera with the IGP mention, not just a loaf sold in Matera.

For the town, see Matera and things to do in Matera. For the region's table, see food in Basilicata.

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