Wandering around the city with your nose in the air, you might come across the most curious pandoro in Verona. On Corso Portoni Borsari, in this late 19th-century building, which was the Melegatti factory in 1894, pandoro is said to have been born.

Domenico Melegatti, son of the pastry chef Pietro, patented that cake, and so on October 14, 1894, he received an Industrial Patent Certificate from the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce of the Kingdom of Italy, declaring that from that moment on, pandoro belonged to him. The pandoro patent was granted for inventing its name, shape, and recipe. From the very beginning, the cake had a large number of imitators, to the point that its founder was forced to launch the famous “1,000 lire challenge”: Domenico Melegatti invited pastry chefs who produced a cake similar to his to reveal the true Pandoro recipe, offering a prize of 1,000 lire. No pastry chef accepted the challenge.

Legend has it that the origin of the name comes from the exclamation of a young apprentice who, upon seeing a slice of the cake illuminated by the sun, exclaimed in dialect, "It's truly a golden bread!"