A romantic journey to the land of pasta showing how food breaks down barriers and connects people…

Italy speaks seventeen dialects of Italian, and each region takes pride in its local identity. The only universal language that unites them all is pasta.

Based on this observation, Milanese Fedrico Tavola, whose specialty as a nuclear physicist takes him all over the world, takes supplies of pasta and ingredients with him wherever he goes so that he can prepare recipes for the foreigners he meets.

This apostle of Italian cuisine then tells his new friends the secret history of pasta and how to prepare it.

Of the many anecdotes in this delightful novel, one earned it its title.

In the 1930s, the futurist Marinetti and then Mussolini himself decreed the end of pasta, considered emollient and decadent, unlike rice, which was proclaimed invigorating, national (the Po Valley) and therefore fascist, while pasta from the south inclined one to take a siesta.

North against South. Hence the Milanese risotto. For good measure, the author

recounts that the anti pasta diktat came to an abrupt end the day a photographer caught Marinetti in front of a huge plate of spaghetti.

Federico Tavola is a nuclear physicist. Author of La Grammatica di frontiera, selected for the prestigious Strega Prize, he has written this love story about pasta in French.