An Issue All About Pasta and What It Means to Eat It

The dish, in all its many forms, has become synonymous with Italy’s culture.

T’s May 19 Travel issue is dedicated to pasta in Italy, diving deep into the culinary traditions, regional variations and complicated history of the country’s national symbol.

I (like you, I’m sure) have friends who don’t eat meat. I also have friends who don’t eat fish. Others don’t eat eggs. Then there are the ones who don’t eat fruit. Vegetables. Gluten. Dairy. Nuts. Sugar. Chiles. Salt. Sugar.

But everyone eats pasta … or tries their hardest to find a decent substitute. And who can blame them? Pasta — any kind of noodle, really, but pasta in particular — is a food so lovable that it feels almost elemental. Most of us can’t remember the first time we ate it, but most of us never want to live without it.

In Italy, however, pasta isn’t just a food — it’s a symbol, synonymous with the very culture. Before the country was unified between 1861 and 1871, Italy was a series of fiefs, but pasta was something they all shared. The north was associated with pasta fresca (“fresh pasta”), made with common wheat; the south with pasta secca (“dried pasta”), made with heartier, more protein-rich durum wheat. Yet that wheat originated not in Italy, notes the T writer at large Ligaya Mishan in her story about the country’s most iconic dish, pasta al pomodoro, but in the Fertile Crescent some 10,000 years ago, before it was “likely brought to Europe by the Arabs who occupied Sicily from the ninth through the 11th centuries.”

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