Marco Polo did not bring spaghetti from China, despite the legend
The story that Marco Polo carried pasta home from China began with a 16th-century misreading of his travels, and a 1929 trade newsletter even invented a sailor named Spaghetti. The real trail runs from Persian strip bread through Arab Sicily, where dried pasta was already produced at scale by the mid-12th century.
The ancestor was a thin, usually unleavened bread from the Middle East. In the Persian Sasanian Empire it was called lakhsha, and rishta once cut into strips and dried. After Arabs conquered Persia in the 7th century they spread dried pasta through their territories, including Sicily from the 9th century. The geographer Al-Idrisi recorded the first thin dried pasta at Trabia near Palermo, where it was known as itriyya, and several Sicilian farms were making it for export by the mid-12th century.
The name arrived later. In the late 15th century Martino da Como described cutting dough with a wire as thin as spagho, meaning string, and drying it in the sun, often for twelve days in summer. He also advised boiling Sicilian macaroni for two hours. Physicians following Hippocrates and Galen held that opposites cure opposites, so soft pasta was paired with dry spices and aged cheeses such as pecorino and parmigiano. The slippery, hot strands also helped bring the fork into Italian use, and by the 14th century diners were described twirling spaghetti.
Naples took over in the 17th century. Around 1630, famine under Spanish rule coincided with machines for mixing and extruding dough that slashed prices, turning pasta from elite fare into a staple. Tomato sauce joined it by the late 1700s, though sauce was poured over grated cheese until the 20th century reversed the order. Firm, briefly cooked pasta was only taken for granted in Naples by the mid-19th century. Italian consumption doubled from 14 kg per person before the Second World War to 28 kg by 1955.
The Polo myth grew from Giovanni Battista Ramusio's 1559 edition of his travels, which misread Polo's comparison of Sumatran sago dishes to Italian pasta. Spaghetti has since travelled widely: Filipino spaghetti, sweetened with banana ketchup developed during wartime tomato shortages, and a 1957 BBC Panorama April Fools' hoax about a Swiss spaghetti harvest.
Source: Spaghetti
