Twenty Regions, One Country: A Pasta Map of Italy

Italy is not a country. It is twenty countries pretending to be one for the sake of tourism and the European Union. Each of its twenty regions speaks a different dialect, eats from a different harvest, and — most importantly for our purposes — has its own pasta. To understand Italian food, you have to abandon the idea of 'Italian food' and start eating regionally. What follows is a brisk, opinionated tour from the Alps to the toe of the boot, with a few stops in places tourists rarely go.

The North: butter, eggs, and stuffed things

Emilia-Romagna

If pasta has a capital, it is Bologna. This is the home of fresh egg pasta — tagliatelle, tortellini, lasagne verdi — and of ragù alla bolognese, which (let me say this kindly, but firmly) is not the orange grease you have been served abroad. Real ragù is slow-cooked beef and pork with a whisper of tomato, white wine, and milk, simmered for hours until it is the color of wet earth and the consistency of a velvet curtain. It belongs on wide, eggy tagliatelle. It does not, repeat does not, belong on spaghetti. There is no such thing as 'spaghetti bolognese' in Bologna. There never was. It is the culinary equivalent of a tourist wearing socks with sandals — harmless, common, and embarrassing only if you notice.

Piemonte

Up against the French border, Piemonte gives us tajarin — impossibly thin egg ribbons made with up to 40 yolks per kilogram of flour, the color of an autumn leaf, served with butter and shaved white truffle from Alba. There is also agnolotti del plin, tiny pinched pillows stuffed with three roasted meats. This is aristocrat pasta, the food of Savoy kings who married into half the royal houses of Europe.

Liguria

The Ligurian coast invented pesto — basil, pine nuts, garlic, Parmigiano, pecorino, and olive oil, pounded in a marble mortar with a wooden pestle. It is dressed onto trofie, short hand-rolled twists, often with boiled potatoes and green beans tossed into the same pot. The potatoes thicken the sauce; the beans add bite. This is the dish our company is named after, and we will fight, gently, anyone who puts pesto in a blender. The friction of the blades heats the basil and turns it bitter. Use a mortar. Or at least pulse it cold.

Veneto, Lombardia, Friuli

The far north is rice and polenta country, but pasta sneaks in. Veneto eats bigoli — fat, rough-textured spaghetti made on a torchio press, dressed with anchovies and onions slow-cooked until they collapse. Lombardia gives us pizzoccheri, dark buckwheat ribbons baked with potatoes, cabbage, and stringy Valtellina cheese — a dish so heavy it is essentially a winter coat. Friuli, on the Slovenian border, makes cjarsons, sweet-savory ravioli stuffed with raisins, ricotta, mint, and cinnamon — a reminder that the Habsburgs were here for a long time.

The Center: the heartland of red sauce

Lazio

Rome is the four-sauce city. Every Roman knows them and every Roman has an opinion. Carbonara: guanciale (cured pork jowl), eggs, pecorino romano, black pepper. No cream. Ever. Cacio e pepe: pecorino and pepper, emulsified with starchy pasta water into a sauce that should not, by any law of physics, exist. Gricia: cacio e pepe plus guanciale. Amatriciana: gricia plus tomato. They are mathematically related, like a family tree, and you can taste the genealogy. All four are traditionally served on tonnarelli, bucatini, or rigatoni — never spaghetti, despite what your guidebook says.

Toscana, Umbria, Marche

Tuscany gives us pici — thick, hand-rolled, slightly uneven strands that look like fat spaghetti made by a tipsy nonna, dressed with cacio e pepe or with garlicky aglione tomato sauce. Umbria does strangozzi (also called stringozzi or strozzapreti depending on the village), often with shaved truffle from Norcia. The Marche, on the Adriatic, makes vincisgrassi — a baroque lasagne with chicken livers, prosciutto, and a béchamel said to have been invented for an Austrian general named Windisch-Graetz, who probably never ate anything so good in his life.

The South: durum wheat, sea, sun

Campania

Naples is the cathedral of dried pasta. Spaghetti, vermicelli, ziti, paccheri, fusilli — all born or perfected here, where the Vesuvian climate and Bourbon engineering combined in the 1700s to industrialize what had been a peasant food. The mother sauce is alla puttanesca: tomatoes, anchovies, capers, olives, garlic, chile, parsley. The name means 'of the prostitute,' and depending on who you believe it is either because the dish was made quickly between clients or because it is, like the women it is named after, loud, salty, and unforgettable. Either way: it is one of the great fast sauces in the world.

Puglia

The heel of the boot makes orecchiette — 'little ears,' shaped by dragging your thumb across a tiny disk of semolina dough. In the old quarter of Bari, women still sit in their doorways making them by hand. The classic dressing is cime di rapa: bitter turnip greens, garlic, anchovies, chile, and a final breadcrumb scatter for crunch. It is one of the cleanest, brightest, most addictive pasta dishes on the peninsula.

Calabria, Basilicata, Molise, Abruzzo

The south is hot, dry, and broke, which is exactly the conditions that produce great food. Calabria gives us fileja with 'nduja, a spicy spreadable pork sausage so red it looks radioactive. Basilicata makes ferrazzuoli, twisted around a knitting needle, with lamb ragù. Abruzzo invents maccheroni alla chitarra, cut on a wooden frame strung with wires like a guitar, dressed with tomato and tiny meatballs. Molise mostly keeps to itself and would like to be left alone, thank you.

Sicily

The cradle of European pasta itself. Sicily gives us pasta alla Norma (named after Bellini's opera): rigatoni with tomato, fried eggplant, basil, and salted ricotta. It gives us pasta con le sarde: bucatini with fresh sardines, fennel, raisins, pine nuts, and saffron — a dish that tastes like every conqueror who ever set foot on the island, Greek and Arab and Norman, layered like sediment. It also gives us anelletti al forno, baked rings stuffed with everything in the fridge — a Palermo Sunday dish that ought to be illegal.

Sardegna

Sardinia is barely Italy. It is its own island culture, with its own language, and its own pastas: fregola (toasted semolina pearls, somewhere between couscous and pasta), malloreddus (tiny ridged shells the locals call 'little bulls'), and culurgiones, hand-pleated ravioli stuffed with potato and mint that look like little wheat sheaves. The classic dressing is a simple tomato and saffron sauce. The sheep are everywhere. The cheese is unforgettable.

How to use this map

If you take only one practical thing from this tour, take this: when you cook an Italian dish, pick a region and stay there. Don't put cream in your carbonara because the internet told you to (carbonara is Roman). Don't put basil on your Bolognese (Bolognese is Emilian). Don't serve pesto on penne (pesto is Ligurian, and penne are the wrong shape for it — pesto wants twists or trenette). Authenticity, in pasta, is not snobbery. It is the accumulated wisdom of a thousand small kitchens that found the answer to a specific question.

And then, having learned the rule, break it lovingly. The Italian-American grandmothers of Brooklyn who put meatballs on spaghetti were not wrong; they were inventing something new and beautiful out of memory and meat money. Your kitchen is allowed to do the same. Just know which region you are leaving when you leave it. Travel is more interesting when you know where you started.