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. The company is still there, and every Marcato is still made in Italy.

The Atlas 150

A hand cranked roller with an adjustable gap, a clamp for the table, and a cutter head. That is the entire machine. It needs no power, it takes up the space of a book, and it has outlasted every electric pasta gadget sold against it for sixty years because there is nothing in it to fail.

What it does is turn a rested dough into a sheet you could read through, one setting at a time, and then cut that sheet into tagliatelle or fettuccine without tearing it. Marcato calls the Atlas an international icon in its own history, and for once that is not overstating it. It is the machine on the counter in almost every Italian kitchen that makes its own pasta.

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.