The history of food consumption offers a wide range of thematic and disciplinary facets, lending itself to approaches in economic and environmental, scientific and technical, social and religious history. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the history of a typical product in a Southern Italian Region, Puglia, to allow us to show the relationship between agriculture, local alimentary tradition, agro-food industry and governmental policies. The idea is to bring out, through the history of a local product, the identity of the area and to make of the agro-food typicality an instrument of socio-economic intermediation. We will refer in particular to a product that boasts a wide commercial spread and an undisputed popularity, pasta, to which a rooted social, cultural and economic tradition has given a leading role in the national and international food scenario. We will refer to a geographical area, deputized by a long historical tradition to the extensive production of wheat, the Tavoliere di Puglia, and our survey goes from the end of the XIX to the XX century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]