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Eating Spaghetti by the Fistful Was Once a Neapolitan Street Spectacle

Tourists flocked to see the "macaroni eaters" cram noodles into their mouths.

John Lawson Stoddard, an American visitor to Naples, wrote about one night when, while driving through a market, he stopped to buy 20 platefuls of macaroni just to watch people eat them. “I had expected to be amused, but this mad eagerness for common food denoted actual hunger.” Macaroni, as Stoddard discovered, was not just a Neapolitan idiosyncrasy, but an important form of sustenance for the poor. The Neapolitan working poor, who had long subsisted on a diet of mostly cabbage and meat, now relied heavily on pasta, which filled up hungry bellies and provided a wealth of calories.

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