From 1888...
In 1888, Settimio Latini moved from his native town of Jesi to the countryside of Osimo, near Ancona in the Marche region of Italy, to manage farmlands owned by local noble families. Following the custom of the time, he also established a farm of his own.
When his son Enrico took over, he introduced new concepts, dedicating himself to research into the most resistant and productive varieties of wheat to satisfy both farmers with quantity and millers with quality.
In the 1950s, the reins passed to his son Secondo, Carlo’s father.


Carlo e Carla
When I first met Carlo, in 1984, we decided together to bring the quality of wheat to a maximum in our fields, drawing on the accomplishments and experience handed down through three generations.
That encounter led to our collaboration with Professor Cesare Maliani in guiding Carlo’s quest to cultivate outstanding durum wheat varieties. Cesare Maliani at Recanati followed the path of his father Cirillo, the favorite student and leading advocate of the works of Professor Nazzareno Strampelli, the acknowledged father of modern cereal culture in Italy.
The discovery that each variety of durum wheat has its own color, aroma, flavor and texture was a revelation that inspired us with new energy and passion.
In 1988, Carlo created the first experimental fields of the Azienda Agraria Latini exactly a century after its foundation. Since then, with each harvest, he’s managed to grow more than 50 varieties of durum wheat to be analyzed and tested, each with different flavor traits and nutritional values.

Aroma and Flavor
It was my idea to produce pasta out of Carlo’s best varieties of wheat. We were inspired by the notes we found written by Carlo’s grandfather Enrico dating to the 1930s, results of tests that local bakers and pasta factories had carried out using flour from his experimental varieties of grain.
In the summer of 1990, I spent many days cooking 27 different types of pasta obtained from an equal number of durum wheat varieties. I observed their colors, touched their rough surfaces, listened to the sounds they made when they cracked and smelled their aromas as they cooked in abundant boiling water. I tasted each pasta without a sauce after 5, 8, 10 and 12 minutes of cooking, as well as after 30 minutes and again after as much as 5 hours.
The test was exhausting and pitiless, but in the end it enabled us to establish the selection of grains that went into our winning team that made up the blend for the first pasta Latini.