Abel Solans
On November 18, 1911, the Italian embassy in Cairo informed the Ministry of Interior that Giuseppe Serracchioli had arrived in Alexandria from Marseille with a machine for making pasta. Serracchioli, a sailor born near Bologna in 1872, had settled in Egypt in 1902. He was known and monitored for his anarchist and revolutionary ideas. The Egyptian police were interested in this pasta machine and alerted the Italian consulate because, according to their information, it concealed a machine gun. Serracchioli was likely aware that transporting such a machine would not arouse suspicion. Indeed, there was a significant Italian community in Egypt, which as evidenced by numerous advertisements in Italian-language newspapers (Fig. 1), consumed both imported from Italy and locally produced pasta.


Fig. 1 Advertisements for imported and local pasta in Egypt, L’Imparziale, July 18th 1892.
The circulation of pasta machines to the southern Mediterranean did not only concern Egypt; it was probably even more significant in Tunisia, where, at the beginning of the 20th century, more than 80,000 Italian nationals resided (Finzi 2003). In Tunis, pasta was among the most consumed products by the Italian community. In 1908, an average of 15,000 kilograms was produced daily. That same year, there were 44 pasta manufacturers in Tunis employing more than 80 workers. These establishments were equipped with various machines necessary for production, including kneaders, and, especially, presses that shaped spaghetti, macaroni, and other forms. In Tunisia, all the owners of these establishments, as well as the workers, were Italian men. These businesses operated as small, family-owned workshops, each employing only a few workers (Fig. 2). The lower-paid workers, earning 2.75 francs in 1908, carried out the most physically demanding tasks. They started work at 5pm and for 15 hours prepared and kneaded dough made from durum wheat semolina and water. More skilled workers then pressed the dough into various shapes, after which it was cut and dried.

Fig. 2. Usine de pâtes alimentaires, Tunis (Camera di Commercio italiana di Tunisi, Gli Italiani nella Tunisia, Tunis, 1906, p. 36).
Pasta quickly became a symbol of Italian identity. As in most Italian migration centers, its production and consumption were closely associated with members of the Italian community, regardless of their regional and social origins. While in Italy, pasta consumption was mostly limited to urban populations, particularly in the South, in Tunisia, it became the staple food of the Italian working class. For some Italians, pasta consumption only became a habit after settling in Tunisia, where they also developed a stronger sense of national identity. The presence of pasta machines in the southern Mediterranean helped make this food a marker of national identity, thus fostering a form of “everyday nationhood” (Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008).
Unlike in the United States, where pasta imports were more significant than local production until the end of World War I, this was not the case in the southern Mediterranean. The presence of workshops equipped with pasta-making machines and the volume of production in Tunisia suggest that imported pasta constituted only a minor portion of local consumption. While Italy exported food products to migrant communities as a source of foreign currency, this was probably not the case for pasta in Tunisia. Indeed, the trade in Italian-made food products played a key role in maintaining ties between migrants and their homeland, while reinforcing the Italian government’s influence over its emigrants. The significant Italian emigration and the expectation that migrants would defend Italian interests abroad formed the foundation of Italian particular colonialism in Tunisia and Egypt (Viscomi 2024). In Tunisia, the proximity and supervision of the Italian community likely reduced the need for commercial ties to sustain migrants’ attachment to their homeland (Montalbano 2023). Another reason pasta was not only imported from Italy is that, unlike the United States and France, which grew soft wheat for flour production, Tunisia had the necessary raw material for making dry pasta: durum wheat semolina, the same used for couscous.
The link between pasta production and Italian identity became clear in 1911 during the Italian invasion of Tripolitania. A campaign to boycott Italian products led to a 30% drop in pasta sales highlighting the extent to which Arabic-speaking populations regularly consumed this food. Indeed, newspapers like Al-Mouchīr expressed concern over the fact that pasta was the only sector in which native Tunisians could not replace Italian labor.
Pasta machines also played a role in the early struggles of the trade union movement in Tunisia. In 1908, pasta workers in Tunis went on strike, demanding either a wage increase or a reduction in the price of a kilogram of pasta, which had risen from 0.45 to 0.50 francs. Machines, likely presses such as the one shown in the photo (Fig. 2), proved to be an important element in negotiations between workers and employers. The cost of rental of these machines was one of the main arguments put forward by employers to justify the price increase. Giuseppe Natoli, an anarchist leader of the Italian labor movement in Tunisia, encouraged workers to form a cooperative that would allow them to resume work and sell pasta at 0.45 francs per kilogram. This cooperative was created a few days later as soon as workers managed to rent the necessary equipment.
Pasta machines most likely originated from Italy, though the example of Serracchioli shows that they could also be bought in France (Fig. 3). As in the United States, pasta producers in France sought to expand their market beyond the Italian community. To do so, they emphasized more mechanized and hygienic production, distancing themselves from the image of Italian producers who dried their pasta outdoors, with little regard for sanitary concerns (Cinotto 2013). It is unclear whether this trend extended to the southern Mediterranean. However, if it did, the fact that the machine Serracchioli brought came from France may have served as a selling point.

Fig. 3. Advertisement for the pasta manufacturer Scapini, 1900. (Musée national de l’histoire et des cultures de l’immigration).
However, did Giuseppe Serracchioli really intend to produce pasta? Probably not. Despite carrying a weapon, he was not arrested in Egypt, as he immediately left for Muhammarah, an emirate at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. According to informants from the Italian consulate, Sheikh Khaz’al, the Emir of Muhammarah, had tasked Serracchioli with bringing machines from Europe for making explosives and bombs. Yet, no mention of such machines is made in the surveillance reports. Could the pasta machine have been repurposed for producing explosives?
One could speculate that a kneader might have been used to mix explosive dough or that a press could have shaped them into cartridges. But it is also possible that the device was not a pasta machine at all, and the Egyptian surveillance authorities inferred its function from the nationality of the person transporting it. In any case, the arms smuggling was successful. By 1915, French intelligence reported that, Serracchioli continued trafficking arms in the Bassora region and the Persian Gulf. His connection to typically Italian machinery did not end there: in the 1920s, he was in Paris and became the general representative of the “Percolateur Express” coffee machine brand. Through this business and his employees, he gathered information on the anti-fascist movement, which he passed on to the Italian authorities.
Following Tunisia’s independence, many Italians emigrated, leading to the disappearance of several pasta workshops. Those that remained became associated, in the memory of Tunisians, with artisanal pasta production (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Poster from the 1960s. Gandolfo pasta was produced in Tunisia until the late 1990s. There have been two Italian pasta manufacturers named Gandolfo since 1886.
Industrial production, meanwhile, was carried out by Tunisian companies. To our knowledge, the first workshop founded by a Tunisian, Habib Mellouli, in partnership with an Italian, was in 1943 in Sousse. The Mellouli Pasta Company, which later became Épi d’Or, mechanized its operations and, by 1990, produced 100 tons of pasta per day. Traditional machines, therefore, remain strongly linked in the collective imagination to Italian craftsmanship, symbolizing both Italian colonization and a broader cultural exchange.
References
Simone Cinotto, The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Champaign, United States : University of Illinois Press. 2013.
Silvia Finzi, Mestieri e professioni degli Italiani di Tunisia. Tunis : Ambasciata Italiana di Tunisi. 2003.
J. E. Fox & C. Miller-Idriss, “Everyday nationhood,” Ethnicities 8, no. 4, 2008, p. 536–563.
Gabriele Montalbano, Les Italiens de Tunisie : La construction d’une communauté entre migrations, colonisations et colonialismes (1896-1918). Rome : Publications de l’École française de Rome. 2023.
Joseph John Viscomi, Migration at the End of Empire: Time and the Politics of Departure between Italy and Egypt. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. 2024.
