THE PASTA THAT TRAVELED THE WORLD

It’s easy to say pasta. A typical food of Italian cuisine, pasta in its various formats lends itself to being seasoned in a thousand different ways, from the simplest and most elaborate recipes to gourmet dishes. But when and where is pasta born, that is, what is the history of pasta?

The history of pasta has its origins in ancient times, well before the Chinese spaghetti that Marco Polo, who returned from the East in 1295, had the opportunity to know. Already Etruscans and Romans, according to archaeological findings, prepared and ate the “lagana”, the ancestor of modern lasagna, consisting of sheets of pasta stuffed with meat cooked in the oven.
In an Etruscan tomb in Cerveteri it was even found everything necessary to roll a good pastry: pastry board, rolling pin, bag for dusting the flour on the table, ladle, knife and even a wheel to obtain the wavy edge.

But the history of dry pasta as we know it today is linked to the Arab domination of Sicily according to various historians. It was 1154, when the Arab geographer Edrisi mentioned “a food of flour in the form of threads”, the “triyah” prepared in Trabia (now Palermo); it is no coincidence that in Sicily, even today, there is talk of “vermiceddi di tria”.
From Sicily the pasta thus prepared was then exported to the continent.

In the Arab cookbooks of the 9th century there is already talk of pasta, with its own manufactories for its production: dry pasta was suitable to be preserved for a long time even crossing long journeys in the desert. Over the years, dry pasta will become a productive “prerogative” of the regions of Southern Italy and Liguria: the dry and windy climate of these lands was ideal for drying in the open air.

One fact is certain: pasta, in Italy, was known well before 1295, the year of Marco Polo’s return from China and his contact with Chinese “spaghetti”. Already in the twelfth century, Genoese merchants had spread pasta from western Sicily (the links between Trapani and Genoa are known and ancient) throughout Northern Italy, to the point that long and short pasta was known there in the fifteenth century. Lombard Bartolomeo Sacchi – as “Genoese trie” or “Genoa pasta”. These pastas, subjected to a cooking that we would consider very long – the taste for “al dente” pasta probably dates back to the seventeenth century – was combined with the most varied condiments: in general, grated cheese in large quantities and powdered spices;

Pasta will become mass food only in the seventeenth century and out of necessity: the very serious famine that broke out in the Kingdom of Naples, badly administered by the Spaniards, combined with the demographic overcrowding led the Neapolitans to starvation: they could no longer buy meat but not even bread. Thus the population began to feed themselves with pasta which in the meantime had become cheaper thanks to the invention of new tools that made production easier and faster, namely the malaxer and the press. In those years, in Naples, the inseparable companion of pasta, the tomato sauce, was invented. “The macaroni are cooked and we will eat them”, wrote Cavour on the eve of the annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. But they will, in reality, win the heart of all of Italy.