Altamura bread—a staple food of the peoples of the Alta Murgia region in Apulia—was traditionally made in very large loaves. In the old days, it was customary to knead the dough at home and then take it to public ovens to be baked. In order to distinguish the loaves, the bakers would stamp them with the initials of the head of the family that owned the dough before placing them in their ovens.

Pane di Altamura is a very crisp, fragrant bread. Its crumb, the soft part of the bread, is the color of straw and soft to the touch. Its most distinctive characteristic, however, is that it keeps for a long time, an essential quality for a bread that, dipped briefly in boiling water and dressed with olive oil and salt, provided nutrition to peasants and shepherds for a week or more in isolated farms scattered in the hills of Alta Murgia.

The earliest written document describing the Altamura bread is Horatio's "Satires" in which the Roman poet recalls that during a trip to his native land in the spring of A.D. 37 he tasted "the world’s most delicious bread—so delicious, in fact, that the discerning traveler stacks up on it for the rest of his journey."

In an era closer to ours, the 1527 statute of the town of Altamura dedicates numerous paragraphs outlining the duties of the town's bakers, including the taxes they had to pay to the authorities.