Pasta History
First, let's set the record straight. Marco Polo did not introduce Italians to pasta by bringing it back from China. How do we know that? Because for one thing, in his writings, Polo described his pleasure at eating Chinese noodles, which he compared to pasta he'd eaten back home. A geographer had documented the existence of a pasta factory not far from Palermo, Sicily, in the 1100s, and ships were known to carry dried pasta to the port city of Genoa, where, before Polo returned from his trip east, a man wrote a will leaving a case of "maccheroni" to his heirs.
Now that we got that out of the way, let's consider one other thing. There are basically two kinds of pasta: hard and soft. The soft kind, which is eaten shortly after it's made, is equated with northern Italian cooking. The hard kind, which you are probably most familiar with, and from which come most of those spaghettis, linguines, rigatonis, pennes, etc., that you know and love, are made from hard durum wheat semolina, which is associated with Italy's south.
Little documentation exists on the history of pasta. The Etruscans (forerunners to the Romans) are credited with making the first lasagna noodles. A picture on an Etruscan tomb several hundred years B.C. shows someone using what some believe to be pasta utensils. However, even if they are, no one knows whether they were making hard or soft pasta, Giancarlo Gonizzi, curator of the Gastronomic Library of Academia Barilla in Parma, Italy, told me when I visited. (The library maintains more than 8,000 volumes on Italian cooking.)
We do know that the Romans made dough from flour and water, which they flattened into what they called lagana, which they then cut into strips and cooked. Cicero wrote that he ate something like that, Mr. Gonizzi said. "But we don't know if it was cooked in water or oil."
In the 1st century A.D., in a book on the art of cooking, the author, Apicius, describes the preparation of a mince or fish dish that used "lasagne." In fact, the ancient Romans were known to pay tribute to the gods with certain types of pasta.
As for hard pasta, most experts believe that it came to Italy through Sicily with the Arabs.
"We know that the Arabs had the habit of using pasta because it was easy to carry in the desert and easy to dry out in the sun," said Mr. Gonizzi.
The book, Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History, by Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari states that dry pasta can be found in Arab recipes from as far back as the 9th century.
Pasta was something of a luxury item until the middle of the 17th century, when mechanization made it available to the poorer classes around Naples. By the 18th century it was becoming a daily staple in other parts of Italy. But even then, not everyone could eat it in abundance.
When poverty and hunger drove immigrants from southern Italy to America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they discovered that pasta was comparatively cheap in the States, as was meat. Some of the products that many Italians ate were not available in America. As many Italian grocers of the time were from Italy's Compania region, Italians of all kinds began using garlic, hard cheese and tomatoes, and thus, Italian food in the United States became associated with those items and flavors. Italian cooking on this side of the Atlantic began to rely more on pasta and meat and less on the fruits and vegetables that were staples in Italy. And the portions were larger. The diminished reliance on fruit also contributed to the popularity of heavy Italian desserts, which were reserved for special occasions in the Mother Country. This is perhaps why Americans associate Italian food with weight gain. They're not thinking of the real food in Italy!
On a personal note, I was not raised in an Italian household, and I don't think the word "pasta" was even in our vocabulary when I was growing up. We ate spaghetti, lasagna, macaroni, and my Mom whipped up an exotic manicotti. But we never called any of it "pasta." In fact, until not so long ago, pasta, in Italy, was referred to simply as "maccheroni."
Imagine my delight, when, as a college student I went to Italy and discovered an endless variety of pastas -- back in the golden days when meals were cheap! There were so many regional and local versions that you could eat pasta every day for a year and never have the same thing twice. Pretty good for something that made from two simple ingredients -- flour and water.
In the final analysis, I guess it doesn't matter where pasta comes from or what shape you choose to eat. What we care about is how it tastes and the fact that with its low glycemic index and staying power (which wards off the desire to snack), it can help you to lose weight -- or just maintain it.