Museum

The Loison Museum embodies the passion for the art of traditional bread-baking and pastry-making. Our Museum consists of a showroom and an educational room for company visits and for meetings with schools and universities.

Our Museum was built on our desire to share and communicate the culture of bread making through a variety of artifacts and records,passionately collected over the years.

In the showroom, we display machinery that actually came from an old pastry shop: mixers, dough sheeters, mechanical beaters and even a machine to wrap candies. Along the walls hang several tools for the processing of raw ingredients and for cake decorating.

A special space is dedicated to Panettone and its history, retold through documents, postcards, flyers, posters, newspapers, magazines and old hatboxes.

A separate display case contains ancient glassware that was used to contain extracts produced by some of the most famous pharmaceutical companies.

Finally, the bread token collection evokes noteworthy moments of economic history, from the second industrial revolution to today.

From Portobello Road to our Museum

It all began one morning on Portobello Road, in London. Dario was walking through flea markets’ stalls, when he came upon a strange coin with a hole. He was told it was called a bread token.
The tokens were mostly issued by charitable organizations and handed out to the needy, so they could obtain a certain quantity of bread from bakers. On each coin was the quantity of bread the holder was entitled to: 1 kg, 1/2 kg of bread or 1 whole loaf.
Shortly thereafter, these round, oval or octagonal-shaped coins became the beginning of the Loison Museum‘s collection.

Still collecting

Over the years, Dario’s search for collectibles has expanded to antiques markets of every country, while he is on business trips or surfing the net.

Historical postcards, advertising posters and flyers, antique hatboxes, dough mixers, sheeters, scales, molds, glass bottles to hold extracts and different types of tools are all part of the Museum collection. These items tell the simple stories of the hard-working, skilled hands that were the backbone of our peasant tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries. They represent the artisan vocation from which everything originated.

Today, our company is proud to own a diverse heritage, which not only helps us to showcase our pastry-making culture, but also tells about the economic history of our country, its technological progress, its people and its communications and advertising means.

EXPLORE THE COLLECTIONS