The Tuscan stale-bread-and-tomato soup, slow-cooked into a dense porridge with garlic, olive oil and torn basil, served warm or at room temperature with a final drizzle of olive oil.

Pappa al pomodoro traces to the medieval Tuscan peasant kitchen, a sister dish to ribollita built off the same logic: use the day's stale bread, the season's tomatoes, the kitchen's olive oil. The novelist Vamba (Luigi Bertelli) put the dish on the literary map with his 1907 book Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca, where the boys at the orphanage sing 'viva la pappa col pomodoro!'. The dish entered the canonical Tuscan trattoria repertoire by the 1930s.

4 editor picks for Pappa al pomodoro in Florence, ranked by editorial score. All Florence signature dishes · Pappa al pomodoro across every city.