About us
Pasta and its uniting power: the story of a family
The origins
A leap in time
To retrace the steps of our pasta factory would require going back a hundred years, thinking about the ancient traditions of these hills-because that is where it all began.
The 1930s, a country-bound life, lots of poverty and few ingredients.
Grandmothers, then community cooks, assigned to make Sunday a day of celebration, to reward the hard work of the week. The prize? Fresh pasta – strictly handmade, ça va sans dire.
All of us who grew up in the Langhe associate pasta with a celebratory, convivial moment. A small gift for those we love: healthy, wholesome and delicious.
From these ideals the Antica Madia pasta factory was born.
the foundations
Dreams and entrepreneurship
Our journey starts in the 1980s, from the opening of a pizzeria. From that small workshop, the artisanal pasta factory Antica Madia was born in 2000.
In the second half of the 1980s we took the first step: I, Mariagrazia Giacosa, and my husband Ivo Tedesco decided to open a pizzeria in Alba.
The star of the kitchen is, unexpectedly, fresh pasta, prepared every day together with my mother in the restaurant’s small workshop – first among them the tajarin.
Time and experience bring confirmation: the whole family shares a bond with pasta, we are curious about it, we are passionate about it. This leads to the idea of changing path and opening a pasta factory.
Thus in 2000, in Diano d’Alba, we open Antica Madia, a family-run artisanal pasta factory.
The growth
Generational thread
At first we devote ourselves mainly to the production of dry egg pasta, typical of the Langhe tradition. We begin to experiment with various recipes, to perfect ourselves.
We are confronted with the difficulties of machines, which are replacing what used to be manual labor and small quantities.
We discover that even as we grow in size, the shrewdness and secrets of the craft remain the same, that it is man’s choice that makes good pasta, not the cumbersome perfection of the tools of the trade.
In 2014 our daughter Martina, who has always been involved in the path of the pasta factory, decides to join the project. She becomes passionate about this world and decides to come alongside us, bringing ideas and input, helping us to deepen the project by pushing beyond tradition.
The jump
Colored pasta, the memory of a past tradition
In 2019, the need for more space led us to move the business to a facility in Neive.
The new factory of more than 2,000sqm allows us to expand and modernize our production lines: from this capacity also comes the opportunity to get hands-on with recipes, devise different types of pasta and experiment with shapes and ingredients.
Ivo returns to play with an idea that had already intrigued him for some time, a memory from his childhood: he thinks back to when his grandmother Emilia would pick herbs and use them to flavor the dough for Sunday noodles. With nettle, sage, rosemary.
Is it perhaps possible to replicate those processes with more modern pasta shapes, indulging in the wide range of raw materials that nature offers us?
Thus, after several attempts, colorful striped farfalle were born–the first great revolution of the Antica Madia pasta factory. A product that immediately finds skepticism, but over time is recognized for what it is: a new interpretation of genuine, the modern face of an ancient tradition.
