Fabrizio Mancinetti

The magnetic power of dough started to charm Fabrizio Mancinetti when he was only 14 and worked in the dining room of a seafood place in Anguillara Sabazia, on Lake Bracciano, where he was born in 1992. At the time, he simply served at the tables but – given his mother is a chef and in his family they've always had vegetable gardens and hens – he kept looking at the kitchen. At the oven, to be more precise, trying to get a glimpse of the miraculous rituals of leavening.

So when at 22 he went on holiday in England, he thought he might get a job to finance his holiday and didn't think twice before asking for one at a small Italian restaurant, declaring he made excellent Neapolitan pizza. «It was very far from true, but I started to study right away and from there everything changed», he confesses candidly, now he's considered the best pizzaiolo in England: indeed, in 2016 he won the Papa Industry Awards as Pizza chef of the Year.

At the time he was already the head chef at The Oven in Bath, which now pulls out of the oven three thousand pizzas per week, with no compromises on quality.

«I have never had a teacher – Fabrizio says – I've always been self-trained. Sometimes I made mistakes, but I always learnt». His training accelerated, and soon he met Petra® Molino Quaglia, of whom today he's an ambassador, thanks to a ceaseless work of experiments on dough and flour: «Because the truth is – he says – that kneading is an art because this is a creative work that can only stop where the imagination ends».