Inside Pasta Factories: Amazing Photographs Show How Pasta Production Really Looked Like From the Early 20th Century

Pasta is perhaps the most popular Italian dish originated in Sicily in the 12th century. For a long time it remained a food for the rich and privileged, and only in the 18th century, industrial production has turned the paste into the main cheap product for most Italians.

Mass immigration of Italians to America in the early 20th century helped pasta to gain huge popularity outside of Italy and become a national Italian dish.

However, until the late 1950s, many had no clue about how it is done, and even believed that pasta grows on trees.

These photos from 20th century pasta factories show the actual process by which the dough is squeezed, shaped, cut and dried on its way to the dinner table.

Pasta is hung out to dry in a market.

Young boys carry strands of pasta to a factory yard for drying, 1900.

Pasta strands hung out to dry at a factory in Naples, Italy, circa 1925.

circa 1925

Drying the Macaroni in the courtyard, 1928.

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24 Beautiful Snaps Show Fashion Styles of a Young Lady During the 1950s

In many ways, the 1950s took a big step back, especially for women.

During World War II, while the men were away, women began to gain an independence that was rare before the war. They left their homes to work in offices and factories, earning and managing their own money. Clothing was heavily restricted throughout and just after the war. Everything from the length of skirts to the size of collars was regulated. This resulted in a slim, straight silhouette.

Women wore comfortable clothing like suits and shirtdresses, and even began to regularly wear pants, especially to work. They had to ‘make do and mend,’ buying or sewing well-made clothing that had to last and fixing garments that were past their prime.

The full look of the 1950s was mature, glamorous and very put-together.

Dresses, skirts and undergarments were constricting, but a wide range of new ‘leisure clothes’ allowed people to dress casually at home. Women were expected to be impeccably dressed and groomed in public or when their spouse was home, always with coordinating hats, shoes, bags, belts, gloves, and jewelry.

In privacy, women dressed much simpler, more comfortable. Eventually, these casual fashions became public clothing as well.

These beautiful snapshots from Fifties Sixties Everyday Life that show fashion styles of a young lady during the 1950s.

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33 Lovely Photos Show What the First Day of School Looked Like in the Past Century

While the outfits, books, bags and hairstyles may have changed, the excitement surrounding going back to school, making new friends and learning new things seems timeless.

Take a look at these lovely photos from HuffPost to see how the first day of school has changed from the past century.

A young boy and girl on the way to school for the start of a new term in the 1920s

A girl's first day of school in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, circa 1921

Japanese children in traditional garb start school in California in 1927

A 5-year-old girl shows off her books after her first day of kindergarten, circa 1929

A mother takes her daughter by the hand as they head to school in the late 1920s or early 1930s

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Mary Wallace: The First Female Bus Driver for Chicago Transit Authority, Beginning in 1974

In 1974, Englewood native, Mary Wallace, drove into history when she became the first woman to drive a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus. Wallace was a popular driver who remained on the job for 33 years before retiring.

“I used to work for the Planning & Placement Center when I was going to college, and we had job orders for CTA bus drivers. So I decided I wanted to check this out for myself, and I did. I went for three years, and they kept saying no...”

People kept the wisecracks about female drivers to them-selves, but Mary Wallace remembers the mixed reactions she used to get from CTA riders on her bus routes when they noticed a woman behind the wheel.

“I would get cheers from the ladies and stares from the guys,” Wallace said in an interview with Chicago Sun-Times in 2007, recalling the start of her career with the CTA in 1974.

Wallace first applied to become a bus driver when she was 19 “because the CTA didn’t have any women and somebody needed to break that ice.” Plus, driving a bus seemed like a great may to meet new people, Wallace said. She had to badger the CTA for three years, though, before the agency hired her.

“They said, ‘We just can’t hire you as a bus operator because we don’t have the facilities. We could hire you as something else,’” Wallace said. “But I kept going down there and calling every week.”

Wallace started out driving the State Street bus in June 1974, the first of several routes she’d have during her 17 years as a bus operator. During that time, she was a fixture in the news under such colorful headlines as “CTA liberates its bus drivers” and “Fair sex first for the CTA will leave the driving to Ms. Wallace said the other drivers rarely gave her a hard time, but some guys were” jealous because I had my own private bathroom” in the bus garage.

Handling a 40-foot bus was easy, thanks to power steering. But early on, Wallace thought about quitting several times be-cause of security concerns.

Like other bus drivers lacking seniority, Wallace worked nights, and more than once, she had to fend off passengers who tried to attack her. Even so, Wallace said she’s glad she stayed on the job to see how the CTA has changed over the years.

“When I opened this door, it opened up a whole lot of opportunities,” she said.

From Bread Lines to Big Mac Lines, These Photos Show That Post-Communist Russians Are Loving the American Lifestyle

The dissolution of the USSR left Russia ripe for visual reinterpretation. With the Cold War over we wanted to see who these freshly freed former Communists were. These pictures depicting Russia not as the complex place it is, but in comparison to our own domestic self image.

The 1990 opening of Moscow’s first McDonald’s was an easy symbol for Western media to glom onto, as were other iterations of a nascent consumer culture “emerging” after decades of Soviet dormancy. Subjects finally had the choice between Snickers and blue jeans, pizza or cocktails. The “New Russians” phenomenon further reinforced an image of a class of nouveau riche embracing their innate capitalist tendencies.

Even representations of diverse experience became a means for underlining the split between socialism and capitalism, and pictures from the time often present quirky mashups of Soviet clichés with emblems of Westernization. The implication is that Russians were on a path that would eventually, inevitably, lead them to middle class bliss.

All of this is preferable to the anemic grayness that proceeded. Russians are always so depressed and moody. They should really try smiling more. Or drinking more Coke.

Hundreds of Muscovites line up around the first McDonald’s restaurant in the Soviet Union on its opening day, Wednesday, Jan. 31, 1990. (AP Photo)

After the Soviet Union dissolved, depictions of Russia’s nouveau-riche surfaced as garish and eccentric stereotypes. (Robert Wallis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Billboards for pizza and President Boris Yeltsin, who was running for reelection in 1996, above a Moscow road in 1996. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Russians eat American style pizza from a truck in Moscow’s Red Square, May 28, 1988. (AP Photo/Dieter Endlicher)

Retired Russian army officers, backdropped by a billboard of model Claudia Schiffer advertising for an American cosmetics company, carry the former Soviet navy flag during a march of about 15,000 people marking the 79th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in Moscow, 1996. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

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Cuban Classic Bombshell: Glamorous Photos of Chelo Alonso in the 1950s and 1960s

Born 1933 as Isabel Apolonia García Hernández in Central Lugareño, Camagüey, Cuban-Mexican actress Chelo Alonso was first noticed internationally in the 1959 film, Nel segno di Roma (Sheba and the Gladiator), which starred Anita Ekberg and Georges Marchal. Owing to a particularly erotic dance number, her picture and name became more prominent on the movie's publicity posters than either of the two leads, much to Ekberg's dismay.

Most of Alonso's films were adventure movies in the style of Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules). Hercules starred Steve Reeves and was a wildly popular new genre in film. It paved the way for movies attempting to emulate it. These films required exotic talent, and Alonso's dark beauty fit the bill; she even starred with Steve Reeves himself in Goliath and the Barbarians (1959) and Morgan il pirata (1960). Goliath and the Barbarians earned Alonso the award of "Italian Cinema's Female Discovery".

Alonso became a star in Italian cinema, and ultimately a 1960s cult film heroine and sex symbol in the U.S.

In 1960, while making Morgan il pirata, Alonso met and married Aldo Pomilia, a production manager and producer. After making together Quattro notti con Alba (Desert War) in 1962, they had one son, and she retired for a while.

After the death of her husband in 1986, Alonso moved to the city of Siena in Tuscany, Italy. She retired from film and started a cat-breeding business, as well as a four-star hotel.

Chelo Alonso died on February 20, 2019, at the age of 85.

Take a look at these glamorous photos to see the beauty of Chelo Alonso in the 1950s and 1960s.

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George Harrison and Pattie Boyd on Their Honeymoon on Gibbs Beach in Barbados, 1966

Pattie Boyd was in a relationship with photographer Eric Swayne when she met George Harrison in March 1964, and therefore declined his initial date proposal. Several days later, having ended the relationship with Swayne, she accompanied Harrison to a private gentlemen's club called the Garrick Club, chaperoned by the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein.

In July 1964, Harrison bought Kinfauns, a house in Esher, Surrey, to escape the constant attention of fans in central London, and Boyd soon moved into the house also. The couple were engaged in December 1965, and married in January 1966.

Boyd provided inspiration for several of Harrison's Beatles compositions, including "I Need You", "If I Needed Someone", "Love You To", "Something" and "For You Blue".

In March 1970, a month before the Beatles' break-up, Boyd moved with Harrison to Friar Park, a Victorian neo-Gothic mansion in Henley-on-Thames. By this point, Harrison's devotion to Indian spirituality, particularly the Hare Krishna movement, had begun to divide the couple. They were also unsuccessful in starting a family, and Harrison would not consider adoption.

Boyd resumed her modelling career in May 1971, in defiance of Harrison's spiritual convictions. In 1973, she had an affair with Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood. Boyd said her decision to leave Harrison in 1974 was based largely upon his repeated infidelities, culminating in his affair with Starr's wife Maureen, which Boyd called "the final straw".

The couple's divorce was finalised on 9 June 1977. Boyd's solicitor, Paddy Grafton-Green of the London firm Theodore Goddard, later remarked on the sensitivity shown by each party towards the other, which he found particularly rare in his experience of high-stakes divorces. He said: "There was no overreacting, no greed or playing with each other's emotions – I wish all divorces were so well handled."

These lovely photos captured moments of George Harrison and Pattie Boyd on their honeymoon at their rented villa called Benclare on Gibbs Beach in Barbados in February 1966.

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