No. Marco Polo did not bring pasta to Italy. When he came home to Venice from China in 1295, Italians had already been eating it for generations. An inventory drawn up in Genoa in 1279 lists a basket of macaroni, and more than a century before that an Arab geographer described a Sicilian town making dried pasta and exporting it by the shipload. The Polo story is largely a 20th-century invention that proved too good to die. The real history of pasta is older, stranger and far more interesting. Here is the case, one piece of evidence at a time.
Where the myth came from
Every myth has a birthplace, and this one seems to have been born in 20th-century America rather than medieval Venice. Food historians usually trace the popular version to the Macaroni Journal, a magazine for American pasta manufacturers, which in 1929 printed a fanciful tale about one of Polo's sailors who learnt the secret of noodles in China. It was marketing dressed as history, and it worked. The story passed into films, schoolbooks and menus around the world.
Polo's own book is a witness for the prosecution. He dictated it in a Genoese prison around 1298. In it he describes a flour made from the sago palm on the island of Sumatra, which the locals turned into dishes he likened to lagana and the other pasta he knew from home. You only compare a strange new food to a familiar one.
The Romans' lagana
In the 1st century BC, the Roman poet Horace wrote about going home to a bowl of leeks, chickpeas and lagana. Lagana were thin sheets of dough. Roman sources suggest they were usually baked or fried and layered with fillings, rather than boiled like modern pasta, so historians hesitate to call them pasta outright. Some link the word to lasagne, although that connection is debated. Still, it is hard not to hear an echo of Horace's supper in pasta e ceci, the chickpea and pasta soup that southern Italians still eat today.
Sicily's dried pasta, 1154
The clearest early evidence comes from Sicily. Arab rulers governed the island from the 9th to the 11th century, and Arabic texts use the word itriyya for dough formed into strings and dried. In 1154, the geographer al-Idrisi, working at the court of the Norman king Roger II, described Trabia, near Palermo, where so much itriyya was made that it was shipped to Calabria and to Muslim and Christian lands beyond. This is the crucial detail. Dried pasta keeps for months, which makes it a trade good that can travel by ship. The word lives on in southern Italy: in the Salento, at the heel of Italy, a dish of chickpeas and pasta is still called ciceri e tria.
A basket of macaroni in Genoa, 1279
Then comes the document that finally sinks the myth. In 1279 a notary in Genoa drew up an inventory of the estate of a soldier named Ponzio Bastone. Among his possessions was a bariscella plena de macaronis, a basket full of macaroni. That was sixteen years before Polo got home. By the 14th century pasta was firmly part of Italian life. In Boccaccio's Decameron, written around 1350, a prankster describes an imaginary land with a mountain of grated Parmesan, where people spend their days making macaroni and ravioli, cooking them in capon broth and rolling them down the slopes.
Meanwhile, in China
None of this means China doesn't have its own ancient noodle history. It does, and it is older than anything in Europe. In 2005 archaeologists reported finding noodles made from millet, around 4,000 years old, preserved under an upturned bowl at Lajia in north-west China. Most historians think Chinese noodles and Mediterranean pasta developed separately, from different grains and with different techniques. Polo would certainly have eaten noodles in China. He just didn't need to bring the idea home.
How Naples became the capital of macaroni
For centuries, pasta in much of Italy was an occasional food rather than a daily staple. That changed in 17th-century Naples. Mechanical kneading machines and screw presses made dried pasta cheap, and the towns around the bay, Gragnano and Torre Annunziata among them, became famous for pasta dried in the sea breezes. Neapolitans, once nicknamed mangiafoglie (leaf-eaters), became mangiamaccheroni, macaroni-eaters. Street vendors sold boiled pasta with grated cheese, and customers ate it with their fingers, lifting the strands high and lowering them into their mouths.
Tomato sauce came later. A recipe for vermicelli with tomatoes published in Naples by Ippolito Cavalcanti in 1839 is often cited as one of the first in print. Meanwhile the north had its own tradition of fresh egg pasta rolled out by hand, such as tagliatelle and tortellini. In 1891 Pellegrino Artusi's cookbook La scienza in cucina brought recipes from across the young nation into Italian homes. Italy passed a law in 1967 requiring its dried pasta to be made from durum wheat semolina. By then, emigrants and factories had carried pasta to every corner of the globe.
Cooking pasta well today
- Use a big pot. Allow roughly a litre of water for every 100 g of pasta, so the water comes back to the boil quickly and the pasta has room to move.
- Salt the water properly once it boils. About 10 g per litre is a good starting point, and it is the only chance you get to season the pasta itself.
- Skip the oil. Oil in the water coats the pasta and makes the sauce slide off. Stirring in the first minute is what stops it sticking.
- Stop a minute early. Drain the pasta a little before the packet time and finish it in the pan with the sauce, so the two cook together.
- Match shape to sauce. Long thin strands suit oil- and tomato-based sauces, ridged tubes catch chunky ones, and silky egg ribbons love butter and ragù.
- Fresh egg pasta is fast. It usually needs only 2 to 3 minutes, so have the sauce ready first.
From our books
The Vegetarian Kitchen has a full chapter of pasta, noodles and risotto, and much of Italy's pasta story runs through it. You'll find the northern tradition in the Fresh Egg Pasta Dough with Tagliatelle, and Horace's chickpeas in the Pasta e Ceci. Naples is there in the Spaghetti Aglio e Olio with Chilli, and Rome in the Cacio e Pepe with Vegetarian Pecorino-Style Cheese. The recipe finder will show you pasta dishes across all our books, and if you're choosing between them, you can browse all twelve volumes.
Questions people ask
Who invented pasta?
No single person or country. Noodles developed in China thousands of years ago, and pasta seems to have developed separately around the Mediterranean, from Roman dough sheets to the dried pasta recorded in Arab-ruled Sicily. Italy turned it into a national cuisine.
When did pasta arrive in Italy?
Dried pasta was being made and exported in Sicily by 1154, and macaroni appears in a Genoese inventory of 1279. Both dates are earlier than Marco Polo's return from China in 1295.
Did the Chinese invent pasta?
China has the oldest known noodles, around 4,000 years old. Most historians believe Italian pasta developed independently rather than being copied from China.
Why is Italian dried pasta made with durum wheat?
Durum wheat is hard and high in protein. It makes a firm dough that keeps its shape, dries well and stays al dente when cooked. Since 1967, Italian law has required dried pasta made in Italy to use durum wheat semolina.