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Article snippet: VERONA, Italy — Elena Galeotto, a longtime employee of Melegatti, Italy’s original producer of traditional pandoro Christmas cakes, scooped this season’s final mound of dough from the conveyor belt, rounded it and dropped it into a deep, star-shaped cast. “That’s the last one,” Ms. Galeotto said. “I hope it’s not the last one.” That there are still any loaves on the factory floor at all — or, for that matter, laborers — has made for what the Italian press has christened a “Christmas miracle.” Amid tough economic times and the bankruptcy of other iconic Italian brands, most recently the hat maker Borsalino, the Melegatti saga is being greeted as a fable. In the months before Christmas, workers were striking for their unpaid wages. The heirs of the company founder, Domenico Melegatti, who patented the “golden bread” in 1894, seemed to be running the place into the ground and feuding so bitterly that workers compared them to fair Verona’s Montagues and Capulets. With production halted, Motta, Alemagna and other Milanese heavies started cornering the Christmas cake market with candied-fruit-filled Panettone cakes. Then, salvation came, as is so often the case in Christmas stories, in the form of a Maltese hedge fund. It invested millions of euros for an 11th-hour production of 1,575,000 cakes. The committed employees, working without pay, took to the internet and started a social media campaign that would make Tiny Tim proud. “Eat a pandoro, save a job,” Melegatti su... Link to the full article to read more