☞Pasta (from the Italian word for “paste”) has a long, varied, & somewhat enigmatic history.



☞National Pasta Day is an unofficial food-recognition holiday of obscure origin that is celebrated annually on October 17.

☞Pasta (from the Italian word for “paste”) has a long, varied, & somewhat enigmatic history.




 According to a persistent legend, pasta was brought back to Europe from China by Marco Polo (1254-1324) after he had eaten it at the court of Emperor Kublai Khan (1215-1294). 

In reality, pasta was common in Europe long before Marco Polo ever visited China, but the Marco Polo myth has refused to die.

 Italians accuse Americans of promulgating this myth, beginning with an influential article in a 1929 issue of the American trade magazine “Macaroni Journal” (now “Pasta Journal”). In the 1938 film “The Adventures of Marco Polo,” with Gary Cooper (1901-1961), in the title rôle, points to a bowl of noodles & asks a Chinese man what he calls them. “In our language,” the man replies, “we call them spa get.”

☞Fresh pasta similar to modern lasagna & made from soft wheat was known in ancient Rome.

 Vermicelli pasta made from hard wheat was known in Third-Century Palestine, & also throughout the Arab world from the Ninth Century onward. Pasta arrived in Northern France & Germany in the 12th Century via the Jews. 

Around the same time, the Arab-Andalusian influence brought pasta to Spain & Sicily. From Sicily, it developed & expanded in Italy before becoming a truly global dish from the 19th Century onward.

☞In is curiously interesting that during the 1930s, anticipating the advent of World War II, the Italian Futurist Party claimed that “spaghetti is no food for fighters,” calling for Italian dictator Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (1883-1945) to ban its consumption throughout Italy. 

The Italian Futurist poet & social reformer Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (1876-1944) stated that “it is necessary, once & for all, to annihilate pasta.

 Pasta, however grateful to the palate, is an obsolete food; it is heavy, brutalizing, & gross; its nutritive qualities are deceptive; it induces sloth, skepticism, & pessimism.”

 Marinetti, who was a friend of Mussolini, also stated that “Convinced as we are in a probable future war; the most agile, the most energetic nation will come out on top,” & he claimed that pasta-eating was “not virile.” 

The pasta company Barilla retaliated with a “virile” poster depicting a boy riding on a giant macaroni, but in the end it was a photograph of Marinetti forking spaghetti into his mouth which brought the Italian pasta dispute abruptly to a close.

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