The Bonomi pasta factory in Cremona closed on 14 September 2018, after eighty-six years of operation. Two hundred and thirty workers lost their jobs.

The building, a four-story brick complex on the eastern edge of the city, sat empty for nearly four years. Pigeons got in through a broken skylight on the third floor.

In March 2022, a cooperative of eleven bakers signed a fifteen-year lease on the ground floor and basement, for one euro per square meter per year, in exchange for restoring the space.

The cooperative is called Forno Bonomi, after the building. None of the founding bakers had been employed by the original Bonomi family. The name was chosen as a courtesy.

The lead organizer was a baker named Giulia Borsani, then thirty-seven, who had trained in Parma and run a small bread shop in the Cremona historic center for nine years.

She had been trying, since 2019, to find a kitchen large enough for a wood-fired oven she had bought at auction in Modena. The Bonomi basement, with its reinforced floor, could hold it.

The lease was negotiated with the building's current owner, a real estate holding company in Milan, through the mediation of the Cremona Chamber of Commerce.

The holding company did not want to sell. It wanted occupancy, because an occupied building accrues fewer fines under regional vacancy ordinances. The cooperative was useful to it.

“It wanted occupancy, because an occupied building accrues fewer fines under regional vacancy ordinances.”

The bakers raised 312,000 euros in startup capital. About a third came from a Lombardy regional grant for cooperative enterprises. The rest came from member contributions and a loan from Banca Etica.

They opened on 6 November 2022, with two ovens running and seven employees, including the eleven founding members.

Borsani says the first six months were difficult. The factory's old electrical system tripped repeatedly. The flour suppliers expected a small bakery's volumes and could not always meet them.

By the spring of 2023, they were baking 600 loaves a day. By the spring of 2024, 1,100. By last winter, 1,400.

They added a pasta line in February 2025, partly as a tribute. The pasta is made with semolina from a mill in Manerbio and sold at the factory door on Saturdays.

The cooperative now employs fifty-two people. Of those, fourteen are former Bonomi pasta workers, hired back to a building they had not entered in seven years.

One of them, a man named Walter Cazzaniga, had worked at Bonomi for twenty-three years before the closure. He had taken a job at a logistics warehouse outside Brescia after that.

He returned to the factory in May 2025 as a maintenance technician. He says he was not sentimental about it. He says the commute was shorter.

But on his first morning back, he walked through the third floor, which the bakers had not yet restored, and stood for some minutes by a window where he used to take his cigarette breaks in the 1990s.

He has not asked the cooperative to restore that window. He says it can be done eventually, or not.

The cooperative is structured on a one-member, one-vote principle. Major decisions, including the pasta line, are taken at a monthly assembly held in the staff canteen on the second floor.

Borsani is its current president, on a two-year rotation. She is paid the same wage as the other bakers, with a small additional stipend for administrative time.

She has been asked by journalists whether the model could be scaled. She tends to deflect the question.

She says they reopened one factory in one city because eleven people wanted to bake bread in a particular basement. She is not certain what that proves about anything else.

She does say, when pressed, that the building feels different now. The pigeons are gone. The skylight on the third floor was repaired in 2023. The brick is warm again at night because the ovens are running.