Italian pasta splits along a line drawn by climate and wheat. The hot, dry south and the islands grow hard durum wheat, and their pasta is mostly semolina and water, often dried: spaghetti from Gragnano near Naples, orecchiette from Apulia, bucatini with sardines in Sicily, malloreddus in Sardinia. The cooler, wetter north makes fresh egg pasta from soft flour: tagliatelle and tortellini in Emilia-Romagna, tajarin and agnolotti in Piedmont, with buckwheat pizzoccheri in the Alpine valleys of Lombardy. In between, Lazio and Abruzzo pair pasta with the cured pork and sheep’s cheese of the Apennines, in carbonara and amatriciana, while Abruzzo cuts spaghetti alla chitarra on a frame of wires. Italy is the world’s largest producer of dried pasta, about 3.2 million tonnes in 2015–16, and Italians ate about 23.5 kg each in 2015, more than any other nation.
Durum is the hardest of all wheats, and commercial dried pasta is still made almost exclusively from its semolina, which gives a dough that can be shaped, dried in the open air and stored for months. Egg pasta, by contrast, is a fresh food of richer farmland. The tour below runs from the islands to the Alps, region by region.
Sicily: Al-Idrisi’s Itriyya and Pasta con le Sarde
The oldest clear description of a pasta industry on Italian soil comes from Sicily. In 1154 the geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, writing for the Norman king Roger II, described Trabia, on the coast east of Palermo, where streams drove mills and large buildings turned out itriyya, a dried string pasta, in quantities shipped to Calabria and to Muslim and Christian lands. The word and the technique had come through the Arab world; the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten argues that the Moors brought pasta to the Emirate of Sicily as early as the 9th century. By the 13th and 14th centuries references to pasta dishes were turning up across the peninsula, and food historians treat the story that Marco Polo brought pasta from China as a myth; the writer Jane Grigson believed it began in an advertisement for a Canadian spaghetti company in the 1920s or 1930s.
Sicily’s signature dishes still use what the island has to hand. Pasta con le sarde, most associated with Palermo, is bucatini with fresh sardines and anchovies, wild fennel (which grows freely across Sicily), saffron, pine nuts and raisins, topped with toasted breadcrumbs. The folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè published a tomato-free version in 1886. On the east coast, Catania claims pasta alla Norma: pasta with tomato sauce, fried aubergine and grated ricotta salata, named after Norma, the opera by the Catania-born composer Vincenzo Bellini.
Sardinia: Malloreddus of the Medio Campidano
Sardinia’s own pasta is malloreddus, small ribbed shells about 2 cm long, made of durum semolina and water and typical of the Medio Campidano area in the south of the island. Housewives traditionally rolled the dough into strips about 15 cm long, cut it into cubes and pressed each cube against a straw sieve called su ciuliri to give it ridges. The name may come from the Latin mallolus, a lump of dough, or from the Campidanese malloru, “bull”, making them “little calves”. They are the dish of weddings and village festivals. In the Sulcis archipelago, Carloforte’s Genoese-influenced Tabarchino cooking produces trofiette, a reminder of Sardinia’s Ligurian links.
Campania: Gragnano’s Drying Streets and Naples’ Machines
Industrial dried pasta grew up around the Bay of Naples. By the early 17th century Naples had rudimentary pasta machines, and later the kneading machine and press made production cheap. The centre of the craft is Gragnano, a hill town about 30 km southeast of Naples between a mountain ridge and the Amalfi Coast. Its main street was laid out to catch the mountain breeze mixed with sea air, in the days when makers hung spaghetti on rods outdoors to dry. Producers today extrude the dough through bronze dies, which leave a rough surface that holds sauce, and dry it at low temperatures of about 50 °C for two days. Since 2013, Pasta di Gragnano has been an EU Protected Geographical Indication.
Apulia: Orecchiette from the Tavoliere’s Durum Wheat
The heel of Italy is wheat country. The Tavoliere delle Puglie, around Foggia, is a former sea floor of about 3,000 km² and the largest plain in Italy after the Po Valley. Summer drought is frequent, which suits durum, and after drainage the plain is now intensively farmed for wheat, tomatoes, olives and vines.
From that semolina comes orecchiette, “little ears”: small domes about 2.5 cm across, thinner in the middle than at the rim, made from semolina, water and salt with eggs rarely used. Each piece is cut from a rope of dough, dragged across the board with a knife and turned over the thumb; in Bari dialect they are often called strasc’nat, from strascinare, “to drag”. They are documented around Bari from at least the 12th–13th centuries, and a 16th-century manuscript mentioning them is held in the archives of the Church of San Nicola. Some historians suggest a Provençal origin under the Angevin rulers of the 13th century; others see a purely local tradition.
Lazio and Abruzzo: Guanciale, Pecorino and the Chitarra
In the central Apennines the sauces lean on cured pork and sheep’s-milk cheese. Amatriciana comes from Amatrice, a mountain town in the province of Rieti in Lazio: tomatoes, guanciale (cured pork cheek), pecorino and chilli. It grew out of the older gricia, made with guanciale and pecorino alone, which was still the Amatrice way in the 1960s. Amatriciana tradizionale is now an EU Traditional Speciality Guaranteed. Tomato reached the pasta pot late: the first written record of pasta with tomato sauce is the 1790 cookbook L’Apicio Moderno by the Roman chef Francesco Leonardi.
Carbonara is younger still. Made with guanciale, pecorino romano, egg and black pepper, it took its modern form in the middle of the 20th century; it is absent from Ada Boni’s 1930 La cucina romana, and the name first appears in print in 1939, in a Dutch East Indies newspaper describing a restaurant in Rome’s Trastevere. Next door in Abruzzo, the speciality is spaghetti alla chitarra, an egg pasta with a square cross-section of 2–3 mm, cut by pressing a sheet of dough through the wires of a frame called the chitarra, “guitar”. Teramo and Chieti provinces both claim it; before the frame came into use, the pasta was cut with a notched rolling pin. In Lazio the same shape is called tonnarelli and is used for Rome’s cacio e pepe.
Liguria and Tuscany: Genoese Basil and Sienese Pici
Liguria’s pasta exists above all to carry pesto alla genovese: Genovese basil, extra virgin olive oil, Parmesan and pecorino sardo, pine nuts and garlic, pounded in a marble mortar (the name comes from the Genoese pestâ, “to pound”). Basil is documented in the sauce only from the 1850s, and Genovese basil is now a protected designation of origin. The usual partner is trofie, short twisted strands believed to come from Sori in the province of Genoa, which received a municipal De.Co. designation in 2019.
In Tuscany the hand-rolled pici of the province of Siena, called pinci around Montalcino, are fat strands of flour and water, egg optional, each rolled between palm and table. Tuscany also had one of the early pasta companies: Buitoni was already established at Sansepolcro by 1867.
Emilia-Romagna: Egg Pasta from the Po Valley
Emilia-Romagna, on the southern side of the Po Valley, Italy’s largest plain, builds its pasta from eggs, soft flour, pork and Parmesan. Tagliatelle are made with one egg to every 100 g of flour and appear in print as early as 1549, in a treatise by Cristoforo di Messisbugo, steward to the Este court at Ferrara. A solid gold tagliatella in a glass case at the Bologna chamber of commerce fixes the correct cooked width at 8 mm; the classic sauce is a meat ragù.
Tortellini, claimed by both Bologna and Modena, are stuffed with pork loin, prosciutto, mortadella, Parmesan, egg and nutmeg and served in capon broth. Bartolomeo Scappi gave a recipe for tortelletti in 1570, and Castelfranco Emilia, halfway between the two cities, holds a festival for the legend that an innkeeper modelled the shape on Venus’s navel.
Piedmont, Lombardy and Veneto: Truffles, Buckwheat and Bigoli
In Piedmont the egg dough becomes tajarin, thin ribbons served with butter and truffles around Alba, and agnolotti del plin, small parcels of roast meat sealed with a pinch (plin); in the hills of Montferrat, one version is filled with donkey meat. In Lombardy’s Alpine Valtellina, buckwheat takes over: pizzoccheri are flat buckwheat-and-wheat ribbons first recorded by Ortensio Lando in 1550, cooked with chard or cabbage and potatoes and layered with Valtellina Casera cheese and garlic butter. They gained EU PGI status in 2016, and the village of Teglio holds two pizzoccheri festivals a year.
A licence for the first pasta factory was issued in Venice in 1740, and the Veneto’s own shape is bigoli, thick strands pushed through a press called a bigolaro. They were first made with buckwheat and now usually with wholewheat flour, sometimes with duck eggs, and are often dressed with salted sardines.
Put together, the map follows the land: semolina where the summers are dry, eggs and butter where the grass is green, buckwheat where the mountains begin. The dry summers and wet winters behind that split are explained in the climate of Italy, and the twenty regions on this tour are listed in how Italy is divided into regions. Durum is only one of the grains traced in the geography of the world’s breadbaskets.