Protagonista: “Adria” pasta factory in Montevideo
Autore: Furio Percovich

In the “free port” of Fiume (Rijeka, town of the Venezia Julia that between the two World Wars was located on the border between Italy and Yugoslavia) the businessman Luigi Ossoinack was the owner of “La Marittima”, a naval supplies company and of a pasta factory; these two properties after 1945 and the relocation of the region to Yugoslavia were nationalized by the Marshal Tito communist regime.
Ossoinack was able to start different business(like an homonymous forefather, who, when Fiume belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire he established the important Shipping Company named “Adria”) and he decided to emigrate to Uruguay and re-establish in Montevideo the Fiuman pasta factory. He took with him his reliable staff, refugees as well, like the Director Giovanni Maganja and the technicians Giovanni Berton, Carlo Biasi, Giulio Franco,Antonio Kriznar, Felice Penco and Galileo Percovich.
In October 1949 they boarded in Genoa and with machines imported from Italy and supplies produced on site, they newly started the pasta factory “Adria” (using the colours and the brand of the ancestral Austro-Hungarian-Fiuman Shipping Company) and then taking their families with them.
The factory, settled in the Avenida “8 de octubre” next to the Avenida “Giuseppe Garibaldi”, began the production in March 1960 and it soon reached a prominent position in the world of the local food industry, making the Uruguayan people used to eat also dried pasta cooked “al dente” besides the traditional “fresh pasta” of the small local firms.
Ossoinack gave a job also to other Italian emigrates; then in 1955 having heard that Silvio Premuda, previously a timber salesman in Fiume, was in Argentina in the District of Misiones, trying to begin the same kind of commerce, he asked him and his family  to work in the factory. So it was that Premuda and his sons, Gianfranco and Paolo, were members of the management.
The pasta factory was placed in the two central buildings of the picture: later it grew occupying also the two side buildings, in addition to the storage and the distribution centre for the whole Uruguay located in “Eduardo Victor Haedo” Avenue (ex Dante). Nowadays the firm is headed by Antonio Maganja and some descendants of the founders still work there.