Well established in Italy before Marco Polo returned from China in 1295, despite the popular claim that noodles are of Asian origin. Historians tell us that the Romans and probably the ancient Greeks ate pasta, the latter giving the name laganon to a flat cake cut into strips, which the former called laganum, a dish composed of dough strips roasted on hot stones, not boiled in water. (Latin references to pastillum speak of bread and not pasta.) Some scholars assume that the ancient Persians ate a form of noodles they called rishta, while other say that the first form of boiled noodles arrived via the Arab invasions, between the 7th and 13th centuries. In the 1154 book Kitab Rugiar, an Arab geographer named Al-Idrisi described details of pasta making on a large scale in the town of Trabia (near Palermo), which exported pasta throughout the Mediterranean. He used the Arab word itriyah for the long strands of dough, which came into the Sicilian dialect as tria, still used today as a synonym for "spaghetti." Certainly, the environment of southern Italy was ideally suited to growing durum wheat, so the assumption that pasta was there before Marco Polo's time is quite likely.
The fame of pasta really broadened in the 14th century, when bakeries in southern Italy started to sell pasta as an alternative to bread. Then, as now, pasta was the first course of an Italian meal in the south, although in the poorest areas it constituted a complete meal. Its popularity filtered up to the north of Italy, and by the 19th century, giant factories had been set up to produce vast quantities of pasta, which became a vital part of Italian cooking. Pasta is fortified with vitamins that are light-sensitive. If you transfer pasta from its cardboard carton to a decorative glass jar, use it within one or two months. To store it longer, keep it in an airtight container in the dark; pasta will keep in this fashion for about 18 months.
