The main objective of World Pasta Day is to draw the attention of the consumers and media to pasta. Nobody can escape the fact that pasta is a global food, consumed in all five continents, appropriate for a dynamic and healthy life style, capable of meeting both primary food requirements and those of high level gastronomy.

Pasta makers have one simple message that they want to spread from this festival: people should eat more of it.

Italy makes almost three million tons of pasta each year, more than any other country, and Italians eat twice as much pasta per person as any other people.

History of pasta - This food product has played an important role in the country’s diet at least since around 1299 when Marco Polo was apparently released from captivity in Genoa and the story of his travels, written with the collaboration of Rustichello of Pisa, began to circulate. Marco Polo says that he saw the Chinese eating vermicelli. He does not explain what vermicelli is, apparently assuming his readers would know what he meant. He does not say he brought any pasta back with him from the East and he gives no recipes for the making of pasta or information on how it should be cooked and served. Some experts say that the Arabs introduced pasta in southern Sicily around the beginning of the second millennium. Others say the Etruscans were making and consuming some types of pasta more than a thousand years earlier.

No doubt pasta was “invented” numerous times in many places but the Italians have done more than most peoples to develop and exploit it.