Despite their natural proficiency at cooking pasta, few Italians are able to tell you its history.
Most are brought up believing that pasta was introduced by Marco Polo on his way back from China in 1259. In fact, we know that the Romans ate strips on fresh pasta dough or laganum over 1000 years earlier.
Dried pasta, however, can only be made from gluten-rich durum wheat and in the 9C this was only grown in Sicily and other hot countries around the Mediterranean.
In 827, when the Moors invaded the island, they quickly developed a way of working the paste made from this grain into forms thin enough to dry out completely like spaghetti and vermicelli.
It was in 1150 that Arabic geographer Al-Idrisi recorded that the Sicilians already knew how to preserve pasta for long sea voyages: he mentions
"the town of Trabia, a most pleasing site, rich in perennial waters and in mills, with a fertile plain and vast farms where they manufacture vermicelli in such great quantity as to supply both the towns of Calabria and those of the Muslim and Christian territories as well, to where large shipments are sent"
The technique soon spread but for centuries maccaroni siciliani remained the generic term for all dried pasta in Southern Italy.
Only on Unification did the tradition of eating pasta spread up the peninsular. After landing in Marsala in 1860, Garibaldi marched north and on liberating Naples announced
"it will be macceroni, I swear to you, that will unite Italy."
Given all the debates regarding its cooking, however, I would say that there are few more subjects more likely to cause an argument.
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