Launch of the “Sicilian Pasta Days”

The opening session, featuring the XV International Gluten Workshop – promoted by the Gian Pietro Ballatore Research Consortium together with the University of Tuscia in Viterbo – marks a key element: Sicily’s positioning not only as a place of production, but as an international platform for scientific and cultural elaboration on wheat and pasta. Yet this current centrality contrasts with a far more complex historical trajectory.

While it is true that pasta has deep Mediterranean roots, and that as early as the 12th century Muhammad al‑Idrisi described in Trabia primitive forms of dried pasta intended for commercial trade, it is equally true that Sicily has gradually lost its centrality in the narrative and valorization of this product.

This is not a recent loss. Already in the 19th century, the ethnographer Giuseppe Pitrè noted how Sicilians – once identified as mangiamaccheroni – had ceded this appellation to other regions, marking a symbolic shift that over time translated into economic and productive weakening.

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