When Neapolitans Used to Eat Pasta with Their Bare Hands: Watch Footage from 1903

Even if you don’t speak Ital­ian, you can make a decent guess at the mean­ing of the word man­gia­mac­cheroni. The tricky bit is that mac­cheroni refers not to the pas­ta Eng­lish-speak­ers today call mac­a­roni, tubu­lar and cut into small curved sec­tions, but to pas­ta in gen­er­al. Or at least it did around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when i man­gia­mac­cheroni still had cur­ren­cy as a nick­name for the inhab­i­tants of the pas­ta-pro­duc­tion cen­ter that was Naples. That iden­ti­ty had already been long estab­lished even then: Atlas Obscu­ra’s Adee Braun quotes Goethe’s obser­va­tion, on a trip there in 1787, that pas­ta “can be bought every­where and in all the shops for very lit­tle mon­ey.”

Some espe­cial­ly hard-up Neapoli­tans could even eat it for free, or indeed get paid to eat it, pro­vid­ed they were pre­pared to do so at great speed, in full pub­lic view — and, as was the cus­tom at the time, with their bare hands. “Many tourists took it upon them­selves to orga­nize such spec­ta­cles,” Braun writes. “Sim­ply toss­ing a coin or two to the laz­za­roni, the street beg­gars, would elic­it a mad dash to con­sume the mac­a­roni in their char­ac­ter­is­tic way, much to the amuse­ment of their onlook­ing bene­fac­tors.” As you can see in the Edi­son film above, shot on the streets of Naples in 1903, their mac­cheroni came in long strands, more like what we know as spaghet­ti. (For­tu­nate­ly, if that’s the word, toma­to sauce had yet to catch on.)

“On my first vis­it there, in 1929, I acquired a dis­taste for mac­a­roni, at least in Naples, for its insalu­bri­ous court­yards were jun­gles of it,” writes Waver­ley Root in The Food of Italy. “Limp strands hung over clothes­lines to dry, dirt swirled through the air, flies set­tled to rest on the exposed pas­ta, pigeons bombed it from over­head,” and so on. By that time, what had been an aris­to­crat­ic dish cen­turies ear­li­er had long since become a sta­ple even for the poor, owing to the pro­to-indus­tri­al­iza­tion of its pro­duc­tion (which Mus­soli­ni would relo­cate and great­ly increase in scale). Nowa­days, it goes with­out say­ing that Italy’s pas­ta is of the high­est qual­i­ty. And though Ital­ians may not have invent­ed the stuff, which was orig­i­nal­ly brought over from the Mid­dle East, per­haps they did invent the muk­bang.

Relat­ed con­tent:

When Ital­ian Futur­ists Declared War on Pas­ta (1930)

A Free Course from MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once

Julia Child Shows Fred Rogers How to Make a Quick & Deli­cious Pas­ta Dish (1974)

Quar­an­tine Cook­ing: 13 Pro­fes­sion­al Chefs Cook Pas­ta at Home with the Most Basic Ingre­di­ents Avail­able

Pas­ta for War: The Award-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion That Sat­i­rizes 1930s Pro­pa­gan­da Films & Fea­tures March­ing Riga­toni

His­tor­i­cal Ital­ian Cook­ing: How to Make Ancient Roman & Medieval Ital­ian Dish­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.