{"id":4157,"date":"2021-03-15T12:36:57","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T11:36:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/2021\/03\/15\/marco-polo-spaghetti-and-the-myth\/"},"modified":"2021-03-15T12:36:57","modified_gmt":"2021-03-15T11:36:57","slug":"marco-polo-spaghetti-and-the-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/2021\/03\/15\/marco-polo-spaghetti-and-the-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"Marco Polo, spaghetti and the myth"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wpb-content-wrapper\"><p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text text_larger=&#8221;no&#8221;]Few of the myths that pervade the art of food are as persistent as the one that spaghetti were brought to Italy from China by Marco Polo.<\/p>\n<p>Going backwards, the first time we read about this story was in 1928, in the &#8220;<em>Macaroni Journal<\/em>&#8221; (although it may seem the name of a satirical newspaper, it was the bulletin of the US pasta-makers).<\/p>\n<p>In an unsigned article entitled &#8220;<em>A Cathai Saga<\/em>&#8220;, the reporter tells how a sailor saw a local farmer working the noodles and wanted to bring them on board.<\/p>\n<p>Marco Polo then decided to boil them with sea water, and, after finding out how delicious they were, he wanted to name them after the sailor who discovered them: <strong>Spaghetti<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, Spaghetti was the sailor&#8217;s name, according to this imaginative reporter.<\/p>\n<p>Now, it doesn&#8217;t take a lot of debunking to understand that this is BS, being spaghetti Italian for &#8220;thin strings&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Besides that, there isn&#8217;t any source of historical documentation mentioned (if not an overly generic &#8220;<em>legend has it&#8230;<\/em>&#8220;).<\/p>\n<p>Nor is there a trace of this &#8220;legend&#8221; in thousands of texts that, from the Middle Ages onwards, speak about spaghetti (called &#8220;vermicelli&#8221;, little worms, until the nineteenth century).<\/p>\n<p>Yet the story of Marco Polo is still there&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Frustrating, isn&#8217;t it?[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text text_larger=&#8221;no&#8221;]Few of the myths that pervade the art of food are as persistent as the one that spaghetti were<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}