Penne are one of the few pasta shapes whose date and place of birth is known for certain: in 1865, in fact, a pasta producer from San Martino d'Albaro (now a district of Genoa), Giovanni Battista Capurro, patented a diagonal cutting machine of his own invention. This was an important invention as it allowed fresh pasta to be cut into this shape without crushing it, producing pasta in a size ranging from 3 cm half-pens to 5 cm pens.