The flour is mixed in huge basins or drums into a paste until it is the proper consistency to be cut into huge blocks—blocks which look very much like white marble. These blocks pass through a series of machines where they are rolled out into very thin, wide slabs.
The shaving machine, into the top of which the slabs are next inserted, is just what its name implies; and the closer the shave the finer the vermicelli: for on to boards at the bottom of the machine drop in a never-ending stream the endless lengths of dainty very colli, or the somewhat coarser spaghetti. If it is large or small macaroni that is to be made, the process is the same, except that the paste is pressed through openings that give it its tubular shape.
Great machines resembling coffee grinders stamp out the slabs of paste into rings, stars, shells and alphabets which fall' from—the machine in a perfect rain of snow white stars—those dainty little shapes which make one's plate of soup so appetizing, The modern lifts communicating between the factory below and the drying and packing rooms upstairs are literally festooned with white fringe, for the noodles and macaroni which they carry are draped in long cords over bamban poles strung closely together across the lifts.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.