The question generally solicits the answer: Marco Polo. He'd spent seventeen years in China before returning to Venice in 1299. And during the years he spent encarcerated as a prisoner of war in Genoa, he dictated his adventures to an inmate. But the manuscript didn't survive. If Marco Polo wrote anything himself, that didn't survive either. Everything we know of what he did and saw is at the very least third hand.

Which is why there's so much contention about crediting him with the introduction of noodles from China into Italy. Did he actually ever go to China? If he had, doubters argue, wouldn't he have mentioned the Great Wall? Or acupuncture? Or those noodles? None of these appear in the hundreds of the transcriptions of his tales. Another sticking problem for food historians has been that Chinese noodles were made from millet. This was confirmed by the bowl of Neolithic noodles unearthed in 2005 on the banks of the Yellow River, at Lajia. Italian pasta is made from hard-grain durum wheat, which the Chinese never grew. 

Besides, pasta secca was recorded in Sicily at least a century earlier than Marco Polo was born, brought to the island by Muslim invaders. From Diversion for the Man Longing to Travel to Far-off Places written in the 12th century by Moroccan geographer al-Idrisi, comes this:

"Here [in Trabia, a town west of Palermo] there are huge buildings in the countryside where they make vast quantities of itriyya which is exported everywhere: to Calabria, to Muslim and Christian countries."

Itriyya is the Arabic word to describe long thin strands of dried dough cooked by boiling. That doesn't guarantee the Arabs invented pasta, however. Itriyya is an Arabic transliteration from the Greek that refers to something dough-based cooked in liquid.

Now, isn't all this more than you ever needed to know?

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