The Traveller Who Never Carried the Noodle to Italy

Many cooks will say that pasta came to Italy in 1295, when Marco Polo returned to Venice from China with a taste for noodles and a recipe to match. The tale is neat, and it is almost certainly wrong. In 1279, sixteen years before Polo came home, a Genoese notary listed the belongings of a dead soldier named Ponzio Bastone, and among them was a basket of macaroni. The document, often cited in histories of food, places a pasta like dish in an Italian household while Polo was still in Asia.

Older evidence points to Sicily. The geographer Idrisi, working at the Norman court of King Roger II, wrote around 1154 that the town of Trabia near Palermo made a huge quantity of a stringlike dough called itriyya and shipped it to Muslim and Christian lands. Dried dough of this kind keeps for months, which suited merchants and sailors, and it may have travelled through the Arab world long before it became a symbol of Italy.

Noodles in China have their own long history. A bowl of millet noodles reported in 2005 from a Neolithic site on the Yellow River, thought to be about four thousand years old, is often cited as the oldest known example. Yet an early noodle in one place does not prove a line of descent to another. Several peoples may have arrived at the same idea, since mixing flour and water and drying the strands requires no secret.

Several peoples may have arrived at the same idea, since mixing flour and water and drying the strands requires no secret.

The Polo version persists partly because it flatters a story people like, in which a single traveller carries a great invention across the world. The evidence suggests something slower and more tangled, a food that moved with traders, soldiers and cooks, and whose paternity cannot be fixed on any one of them. The myth is often traced to a trade magazine of the 1920s, the Macaroni Journal, which is a reminder that origin stories can be written by those who sell the product.

What remains unsettled is who first dried the strand and why. Each earlier date that turns up makes the chain longer, and none yet reaches a first cook.