the

For more than one thousand years, Italian hands have carefully

crafted dough into hundreds of shapes with creative genius

exceeding any other noodle-eating people in the world.

The spread of pasta, as we understand the term, is relatively

modern. Until the years just before World War II, four-fifths

of the Italian population had a diet predominantly based

on plants, while pasta was reserved for feast days due to the

scarcity and costliness of ingredients. In the 1960s, with the

help of an economic boom, pasta started to appear more

frequently on the tables of rural homes. The vast array of

pastas and traditional uses represent a colorful history in

the sociocultural construct of Italian life. The use of diverse

ingredients was a direct result of the resources that were

available in different regions. Over time these necessities

became tradition — not only respected in Italy today, but

strictly enforced. The Cultural History of Italian Pasta serves

as a means to decipher each of the three hundred ten pastas

listed in Oretta Zanini de Vita’s as a

means to understand an integral part of Italian culture. 1

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