Last week we wrote about Flour to a NAP, is the process of turning the flour into bread, an essential ingredient in the diet. This week we continue the series of articles related to the meal, this time the focus is on the process of transformation to turn it into pasta, a food in the diet of millions of people worldwide. A widespread belief is that Marco Polo, traveler of the thirteenth century, found the pasta in China and took her to Italy. What caught his attention was that the Chinese ate something like macaroni in your country. The pasta was already common in Italy, when the Roman Apicius wrote his famous book “The Art of Cooking” in the first century AD C., but it seems the noodles already existed in China, but they were made with rice flour.

The Arabs and Mediterranean peoples already knew the pasta before Venetian traveler. What I do is amply documented, is that since 1300 the use of the paste is spread throughout Italy and was at the beginning of the eighteenth century when they were born in Naples the first, rudimentary machinery for production. The Neapolitan pasta is not an invention, but it is in that city where he has reached a degree of refinement and quality without compromises. Gragnano Near Naples, he found the way to dry and store thanks to the warm and humid, with winds that allowed the conditions for excellent workmanship. Initially, the pasta was hung to dry in the streets, giving birth to the industrial production of Italian food.