PASTA, EXPRESSION OF ITALIAN CREATIVITY AND FANTASY

The origins of pasta are uncertain.  At the end of the 15^th century the Venetian traveller Marco Polo, on his return from China after 21 years away from Italy, referred  in his book “Il Milione” that the Chinese used to eat a "noodle-like food", a sort of starchy product made from rice or soybean flour and water. So for period people believed that pasta was a Chinese invention, which is not true. When Marco Polo came back from China, in 1295, the people living along the Mediterranean coasts had been eating for long a product like pasta, made from wheat flour.

Another hypothesis on the origin of pasta is based on archaeological findings in Etruscan tombs. The carvings on some of the stucco relieves in the tombs depict a knife, a board, a flour sack, all of which were used to shape tubular pasta.

The ancient Greeks and Romans are also said ate and appreciated a sort of pasta, a form of flattened dough called in Greek 'laganon.' This was not boiled as we boil pasta today, but roasted on hot stones or in ovens.

Apicius, a Roman writer of the first century A.D., describes a pasta made "to enclose timbales and pies...", called "lagana”. Even if the recipe for the dough is not given, there are suggestions for layering and seasoning it with meat and fish.

The consumption of dried “pasta” was probably first introduced by the Arabs for practical reasons. The Arabs, being nomadic people, thought it was better to prepare their meals in advance, dry and make them portable. They moved along the coasts of the Mediterranean where they spread their cognitions of sciences like astronomy and mathematics and, at the same time,  their dried “noodles” or “pasta” (the word used for the noodles was itriyah). So  pasta arrives as far as in Sicily, Sardinia and Liguria and in other parts of Italy. The Arab geographer Al Idrisi wrote that a flour-based product in the shape of strings was produced in Palermo, then an Arab colony.

In the 15^th century in Italy there were about 1400 pasta factories, mainly in Sicily, Campania, Latium and Liguria, in towns and places whose weather conditions were more favourable to dry the product.

Later pasta was also made at home by housewives and served with different sauces and flavours invented by Italian gastronomic experts.

When the Spanish brought the tomato back from America in the 15^th an 16^th centuries, it became the ideal “companion” of pasta and since then tomato sauce has been characterizing and accompanying the success of Italian pasta.

Pasta continued to be sun-dried until 1908, when Filippo De Cecco, owner of a famous pasta factory in the town of Fara San Martino, Abruzzo, started a drying machine that could give a perfect product in short times.

Today in Italy  pasta factories are almost 200. There is a pasta museum, too. It was created by another famous pasta factory, Agnesi, in the town of Pontedassio, in Liguria.

As concerns the pasta consumption, Italy is the first place in the world with the average consumption of more than 30 Kg. a year for each Italian, while Switzerland has 7 Kg., France 6 and the United States 5.