Pasta may be the unchallenged symbol of Italian food, yet no in-depth research has ever been done on its many shapes. Recent cookery texts are stuck mainly on the nobler stuffed pastas, with little attention to their form, and recipes nowadays almost always call for factory-made pasta. One small exception is Luigi Sada and his 1982 Spaghetti e compagni,1 where he talks about the shapes of homemade pasta in Puglia, his home region. A century earlier, the work of the Sicilian ethnologist Giuseppe Pitré2 repeats the names given in Perez’s 1870 Vocabolario sicilianoitaliano.3 These, however, refer in particular to the so-called pastas d’ingegno, or what the Sicilians called d’arbitrio, that is, to the first pastas manufactured with the ancestors of modern industrial machinery. There were others, especially in the 1800s, who tried to impose some order on the world of pasta shapes, but they eventually threw in the towel. With no written sources—many of the operators were illiterate—and the difficulty of testing sources directly, they abandoned the project.
