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)
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.
