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BY ROBYN ECKHARDT If I wanted a definitive account of the dish’s origins, I’d be disappointed, warned Piermassimo Cirio, the bespectacled, cheerful 48-yearold who manages the kitchen at Madonna della Neve, a restaurant in Piedmont’s white truffle– an

BY RAHAWA HAILE In Asmara, Eritrea, bowling alleys are adorned with stained-glass windows. A former gas station, modeled after an airplane, is flanked with breathtaking 98-foot wings. Called “Piccola Roma” by Mussolini in the 1930s, Asmara stood as t

By Adam Leith Gollner PHOTOGRAPHS BY FEDERICO CIAMEI We’d come to see the wood carver in Chiavari, one of those perfect smallscale coastal Ligurian dream towns scrunched up between the Mediterranean Sea and the Apennine mountains. Arriving at his add

Portfolio by BRIAN FINKE MONTONI FACTORY, UZZANO, 2:15 P.M. Designers at Montoni, the Tuscan manufacturer that has supplied dies for many big pasta brands since the 1920s, aren’t just fluent in industrial construction materials. They’re also experts

BY STACY ADIMANDO RECIPES BY EVAN FUNKE Photographs by Heami Lee I ’d always imagined learning to make tiny, perfect tortellini from an aging native of Bologna or mastering pillowy agnolotti through a long apprenticeship in an obscure Piedmontese vil

BY LESLIE PARISEAU Photographs by MICHELLE HEIMERMAN The pesto is perfect in its imperfection. A fine, juicy silt of gold and green suspended in oil. The basil tastes alive, as if still reaching toward the sun. “IF YOU are in Pra’ and you don’t grow

Preserve fresh pasta like the Friulians I FIRST LEARNED ABOUT MLINCI, or griddled pasta sheets, from Marcella Hazan’s Marcella Says. In Friuli and neighboring Slovenia, where the cold and damp conditions made it difficult to dry and conserve pasta, t

BY ANDREW RICHDALE In the beginning, there was pasta. Out of the void sprang a colossal tangle of it accompanied by two proportionately large, red-sauced meatballs. On its first day, soaring through nothingness, this supernatural spaghetti being reso

By Chris Colin PHOTOGRAPHS BY DIANA MARKOSIAN A bitter wind ripped along the valley floor, through wild olive trees and up the crumbly hillside where everything was sucking. My interpreter, Mavi, and I were shivering and walking with no end in sight.

By Stacy Adimando Additional reporting by Kat CraddockPHOTOGRAPHS BY BETH GALTON STYLING BY MAGGIE RUGGIERO Farina di grano arso, or “burned wheat flour,” originally referred to the flour made from scorched wheat scavenged from burned fields in Pugli

The 16 bar seats at the Chicago restaurant Monteverde offer a view of one of the slower-paced shows in town, even by avant-garde standards: The two female leads perform on a raised stage in silence, heads down, with faces that betray no emotion. The

BY ADAM SACHS Photographs by Lorenzo Pesce MORNING IN GARDONE RIVIERA IS A RIOT OF TIDY perfection. Songbirds coo contentedly. Wild sun ricochets off the postcard lake. Spiffy wooden boats dawdle under a cloudless sky. The air tastes delicious. Ricca

The pastas served at New York’s Hearth begin as whole grains—berries of farro, blue durum, and red fife trucked in from Upstate. Those grains are milled into flour, made into dough, pressed into shape through a gleaming Arcobaleno extruder, and boile

BY ADAM SACHS In a gift shop at the Palermo airport, they sell a bag of fusilli that looks like fusilli. The package makes the standard promises of pasta purity. The wheat: organic durum semolina. The water: calcium-free. All of it smooshed through a

Funke swears that hand-rolling sfoglie with a mattarello is the secret that differentiates dense, flat-tasting pastas from fluffy, tender ones. “Fuck your pasta machine” is his hashtag and life mantra, but he says it’s not just braggadocio: “If you l

BY CHRIS COHEN Photographs by Matt Taylor-Gross ILLUSTRATIONS BY SARAH MAZZETTI Speaking extremely generally, it’s possible to say Italy has two distinct pasta cultures. In the north, they glorify pasta fresca, or fresh pasta. In central and southern

BY PETER MEEHAN, ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROSS MacDONALD America did not become the world’s second greatest pasta culture—a place where al dente is de facto, when agnolotti and casunziei are spoken on our menus—by chance or by some lucky miracle of groupthin

Ava Gene’s, Portland, Oregon Josh McFadden attended culinary school and cooked in Michelin-starred palazzos in Rome, but “somewhere along the line,” he says, “I realized I wanted to be more in touch with seasonal ingredients in a simpler way.” That l

Every element of pasta dough—the freshness of the ingredients, the hydration of the dough, even how you wrap it while it rests—affects how good it tastes, according to chef Evan Funke of Felix restaurant (see “The Maestro of Venice,” pg. 42). But tha