Pasta capital outside Italy generates large amount of interest at first (8)
I believe the answer is:
rigatoni
'pasta' is the definition.
(I know that rigatoni is a type of pasta)
'generates large amount of interest at first' is the wordplay.
'generates' becomes 'rig' (I can't explain this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'large amount of' becomes 'a ton'.
'at first' says to take the initial letters.
The first letter of 'interest' is 'i'.
'rig'+'aton'+'i'='RIGATONI'
'capital outside italy' is the link.
I am not very happy about this link. Some or all of it may belong to another bit of the clue.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for rigatoni that I've seen before include "Type of pasta" , "Short, ribbed, tubular pasta" , "Foodstuff" , "Short fluted tubes of pasta" , "Pasta - I got rain (anag)" .)