Marcato

Otello Marcato built his first pasta rollers in 1930 and sold them around the villages of the Veneto from a bicycle. The Atlas arrived in 1965 and has barely changed since, which is rather the point.

Shop Marcato

1930

Otello Marcato's first machines

1965

The Atlas arrives

2,500

Machines made a day

100%

Made and assembled in Italy

Sold from a bicycle

Marcato's own account of its founding is one sentence long and hard to improve on. In 1930, in a small workshop behind his house, Otello Marcato made the first machines for rolling pasta, and riding his bicycle he sold them to families in the neighbouring villages.

The factory came eight years later, in Campodarsego just outside Padua, and the company is still there. The machine everyone knows arrived in 1965 and has barely changed since, which is the point of it.

On where they are made Marcato is unqualified, and makes the claim about the company rather than about a particular line: Marcato has always produced in Italy. Their American arm puts it as one hundred per cent made and assembled in Italy.

From Marcato's own history

1930

Otello Marcato builds the first pasta rolling machines in a workshop behind his house and sells them by bicycle.

1938

The first factory is established at Campodarsego, in the province of Padua.

1962

The first order arrives from across the ocean. Machines are shipped to Philadelphia.

1965

Atlas is born.

1982

New markets and research spending make a second factory necessary.

2015

Marcato marks its eighty fifth year with more than a hundred employees.

2023

Vicentia joins the Marcato Group.

The Atlas 150

A hand cranked roller with adjustable gap, a clamp for the table, and a cutter head. That is the entire machine, and it has outlasted every electric pasta gadget sold against it for sixty years because there is nothing in it to fail.

The scale is the surprising part. Marcato says it produces and packs up to 2,500 pasta machines a day and around 250,000 rollers a month, which is an industrial output for an object that behaves like a heirloom.

Three finishes run across the range. Classic is the chrome one. Design is the coloured anodised one. Heritage is the retro one. The mechanism underneath is the same.

What we carry

The Atlas 150, the plain roller version and the Atlas Slide at 180mm, plus the AtlasMotor and the PastaDrive add on motor for anyone who would rather turn a switch than a handle. The Ampia 150 and 180 alongside them, and the Pasta Fresca electric machine.

The Regina extruder for shapes a roller cannot make. The Multipast set, which is the Atlas plus the cutters most people end up buying anyway.

Then the small Italian tools that make the rest of the job possible: ravioli boards with matching rolling pins in round and square, the Stampini ravioli cutters from a 30mm round to an 80mm heart, the Pastabike and Pastawheel cutters, the Tacapasta drying rack, the gnocchi kit, the Biscuits cookie press in five colours, and the Marga Mulino grain mill.