Diana Garvin, “Building Pasta’s Empire: Barilla in Italian East Africa,” Modern Italy 28, no. 2 (May 2023): 97–126.
The Society for Italian Historical Studies is pleased to award an Honorable Mention, recognizing Diana Garvin’s “Building Pasta’s Empire: Barilla in Italian East Africa” published in Modern Italy (2022). The article marshals a laudably rich selection of archival, visual, and economic materials showing the depth of the Barilla pasta company’s involvement in the fascist regime’s exploitation of colonial settings. By showing each link in the chain leading from colonial wheat cultivation to pasta dishes at Italians’ dinner tables, including Barilla’s packaging and advertising, Garvin highlights commercial pasta’s place in imperialist propaganda while also showing that big business made cultural consumption integral to the physical consumption of industrially produced food. The article shows clearly that ordinary pasta today can still carry direct – if unacknowledged – legacies of Italian Empire and contributes to the wider scholarship arguing that Italian culinary ‘identity’ has often been made from above.