A story of tastes

From two simple ingredients, water and hard-grain semolina, a whole world appeared. From these two simple ingredients were born hundreds of families of pasta. Names and shapes that tell about territories, production techniques and a unique popular culture.
At the beginning of May, in Rome, the Association of Italian Dessert and Pasta Industries (Aidepi) met to discuss trends as well as the evolution of this symbolic product of cooking and gastronomy. Italian.

Today, there are nearly 300 forms of pasta produced and consumed in Italy. Despite this great variety, 70% of Italian consumption is concentrated on four national pastas: spaghetti, penne, fusilli and rigatoni.
This statistic is hardly surprising, but which gave the opportunity to one of Aidepi’s managers, Giuseppe di Martino, himself a pasta maker, to map Italians’ preferences for certain pasta families.

An instructive inventory for us French and Europeans accustomed to discussing the real recipes, showing that even Italy is not a uniform territory in terms of tastes, especially when it comes to its dish. national preferred.

If you don’t know the 300 different pasta shapes, don’t worry, it’s an impossible task! And for good reason, in the etymological vocabulary of Italian pasta, there are nearly 1,200 other names of pasta …