Two spaghetti… with history! The Pasta Museum exhibits the two oldest samples of spaghetti of industrial production still known today.
On the morning of January 30, 1838, the clerk of the company Vincenzo Marinelli – food contractor for the Ducal Prison of Parma – delivered, as every day, the supply of pasta to the pantry of the Penitentiary Institute. On that day, however, the pasta was thrown into the pot and “melted” in the water. On the same day, the director Giulio Cesare Verdelli communicated what had happened to the President of the Supervisory Council: this was the start of a dispute that would have involved the Court of Parma and the transfer of the relevant documentation to the State Archives. And together with the letter, two samples of spaghetti also finished, one from 1837 and the other from 1838.
During the work of rearranging the State Archives’ collection, which had opened envelope 1295, we found ourselves with the two packs, complete with wax stamps, containing that paste more than 150 years old, slightly oxidised, but still preserved.
This extraordinary discovery was the starting point for the analysis, with the authorization of the Ministry, of some fragments of the two samples by the Physics Department of the University of Parma and by the Barilla research laboratories. The analyses allowed the Director of the Prison to be proved right: the spaghetti of 1838, contrary to the sample of the previous year, contained soft wheat flour and therefore did not correspond to the quality requirements required by the strict regulations of the Duchy of Parma.
Text by: Giancarlo Gonizzi