How a ‘Strange,’ ‘Evil’ Fruit Came to Define Italy’s Cuisine

T’s May 19 Travel issue is dedicated to pasta in Italy, diving deep into the culinary traditions, regional variations and complicated history of the country’s national symbol.

ON THE COUNTER sits a bucket of tomatoes just picked from a tumble of fields halfway up a mountain in southern Italy. Concetta D’Aniello hands me an apron and we begin. I follow her lead, breaking into each tomato with my thumb, the flesh giving way. The smell of minerals fills the kitchen. Her husband, Sabato Abagnale, known as Sabatino — who grows and cans tomatoes, like his father before him — describes how the scent clings when you walk the fields in August. “Even when you shower, you can’t get rid of it,” he says. (We speak through an interpreter, Sandra Gambarotto.) It’s late October now and the end of harvest; these tomatoes are the stragglers, still dreaming of summer, sun-gorged and supersweet.

The pan waiting on the stove is almost wider than the circle of my arms. A slick of olive oil, garlic cloves dropped in whole and a chop of peperoncino: it’s a matter of a moment, garlic into gold, just long enough to leave an imprint on the oil before they’re skimmed out with a spoon so as not to overpower the sauce. The tomatoes go in all at once, with seeds and skins, and my part is done. D’Aniello turns up the flame, shakes the pan and with a swift glissando of the fingers flicks down salt from on high. All the while, the pasta is boiling in a pot alongside. Torn basil, a ladleful of cloudy pasta water, another and then the pasta itself is swirled in the pan until it half-disappears into the red. “We eat tomato with pasta, not pasta with tomato,” she says.

This is the last time D’Aniello and Abagnale, who are in their 50s with two grown daughters, will eat pasta al pomodoro made with fresh tomatoes until next August. After this, D’Aniello will use preserved tomatoes, processed — or transformed, as Abagnale puts it — under our feet in the clean and bright basement of their home, here in the small town of Sant’Antonio Abate, about 20 miles outside of Naples. First the tomatoes are pasteurized in a vat at the precise boiling point of water, 212 degrees Fahrenheit, for an hour, then in a tank at 122 degrees for 20 minutes. With industrial production, Abagnale points out, it would be longer, at higher temperatures. “You kill everything, but also flavor,” he says. Afterward, the tomatoes are left to cool and rest for 60 days. They taste even better as they age, he tells me. “Three years would be ideal. But no one can wait that long.”

Elsewhere in the world, pasta al pomodoro is seen as Italy’s “symbol of national identity par excellence,” the Italian historian Massimo Montanari writes in “A Short History of Spaghetti With Tomato Sauce” (2019) — despite its origins as a regional specialty predating Italian unification (between 1861 and 1871) by several decades, a creation of Naples when the city was still part of the sovereign Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The dish was brought to the United States by Neapolitan immigrants in the late 19th century before it was fully embraced by their compatriots in the Italian north, as the Russian-born American writer Anya von Bremzen recounts in “National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History and the Meaning of Home” (2023). And yet the dish as first encountered by most Americans (or at least by those not of Italian descent) bears little resemblance to what D’Aniello cooks, in that its primary ingredient is neither fresh nor canned whole tomatoes but mass-produced spaghetti sauce from a jar.

For almost as long as spaghetti with tomato sauce has been eaten in America, people have sought shortcuts. In the 1890s, a French immigrant in New Jersey, Alphonse Biardot, produced what he called “spaghetti à la Milanaise” in a can — pasta, tomato sauce and cheese all included — then sold his company in 1915 to the Campbell Soup Company, which half a century later would come up with the idea of replacing long noodles with tiny rings that could be scooped up with a spoon: SpaghettiOs. Ettore Boiardi, an Italian-born chef in Cleveland, began offering customers a take-home version of his restaurant’s tomato sauce in 1927, eventually adopting the name Chef Boyardee as a phonetic concession to non-Italians. (“Sacrifices are necessary for progress,” he is reported to have said.) The Italian immigrant founders of Ragú, Assunta and Giovanni Cantisano, carried jars of tomato sauce door to door in Rochester, N.Y., during the Great Depression; the brand has now been subsumed into the Mizkan Group of Japan. Nearly 270 million Americans, close to 80 percent of the population, consumed commercial spaghetti sauce in 2020, as calculated by the data aggregator Statista.

Ready-made sauces — sughi pronti, as they’re known in Italy — are made both possible and necessary by modernity, with its insistence on optimizing every moment, on hurry up and now. Abagnale isn’t so interested in speed. Worldwide, around 190 million tons of tomatoes are commercially grown each year, with some 40 million tons destined for canned or bottled products; he keeps his annual output to 30,000 jars, weighing one to two pounds each, four to eight whole tomatoes per jar. (They’re available in the United States from the Bronx-based online grocer Gustiamo.) When he started his own business 26 years ago, he intentionally made it smaller than his father’s: Without the pressure of chasing more and more profits, he can concentrate on the minutiae of seeing each tomato’s life from planting to harvesting, which happens only early in the morning or late at night, with no more than seven hours allowed to pass between detachment from the vine and processing. “We live for six months with that tomato,” he says. “We know its phone number.”

When we sit down at his table, Abagnale says, “San Marzano is the most pimplike of tomatoes — it will do anything to please.” This means it’s as delicious raw as sautéed, even overripe, summer’s long brightness barely tempered. One forkful and I’m ready to dismiss every pasta al pomodoro I’ve had before, to declare D’Aniello’s dish the victor in some imagined battle going back in time, but I catch myself: In an age when we’re always clamoring for the best, when we demand of each experience some rapture or revelation, it’s a relief for something to be simply, beautifully good. If anything, isn’t pasta al pomodoro more marvelous for being utterly ordinary, as my hosts keep insisting? It’s a staple that may be perfected, with outstanding ingredients and the instincts of a great cook, but that to a certain extent resists innovation. I tell D’Aniello and Abagnale about the chef Mauro Uliassi, whose namesake Michelin-starred restaurant overlooks the Adriatic Sea in the resort town of Senigallia, around 300 miles to the north. He devised a recipe in collaboration with the Italian perfumer Hilde Soliani that used fig leaf butter to conjure the chlorophyll-heavy fragrance of the tomato plant in summer. Abagnale, who is intimately familiar with this scent, tilts his head, considering. I add that the Uliassi version was priced at 60 euros and he laughs.

Traditionally, pasta al pomodoro is “a dish of the poor,” he says, which is no diminishment, even a point of pride: It’s what you make out of the little you have, and that’s enough.

TOMATO IS THE prince of our cuisine,” D’Aniello tells me. Yet this ancient fruit, which may be traced back to a genetic ancestor no bigger than a blueberry that grew wild in what is now Ecuador around 80,000 years ago, is a comparative newcomer to Italy, its presence first documented in 1548, during the Spanish colonial era, half a century after Christopher Columbus made landfall in what is today Venezuela. As the Italian historian David Gentilcore explains in “Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy” (2010), a specimen was delivered to the nobleman Cosimo I de’ Medici at his palazzo in Pisa, likely obtained via the connections of his Spanish wife, Eleonora di Toledo. De’ Medici’s steward, in a letter confirming safe passage of the fruit, identified it as “pomodoro” (“golden apple,” presumably because it was yellow in color). This wasn’t love at first sight: “The basket was opened and they looked at one another with much thoughtfulness,” went the steward’s less than exuberant report. In “Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World” (2022), the American writer William Alexander cites herbalists, botanists and physicians of the time whose opinions of the fruit ranged from “strange and horrible” to “unhealthful and evil.”

What brave soul would dare eat such a cursed thing? We must thank a Neapolitan, Antonio Latini, for the earliest extant Italian recipe for tomato sauce, published in the 1690s as a condiment for boiled meats. According to the evidence of surviving cookbooks, it took another century before tomatoes and pasta were combined in a single dish — “the most solemn moment in the history of pasta, for it is only in this union that each finds completion,” the Neapolitan chef Jeanne Caròla Francesconi writes in “La Cucina Napoletana” (1965) — and even then only in soup. Late in the 18th century, the Neapolitan chef and philosopher Vincenzo Corrado championed tomato sauce as a “universal” accompaniment for pasta (as well as for meats and greens), but not until 1839 does pasta al pomodoro as we know it (thick tomato sauce and al dente pasta, finished together in a pan) enter the written record in a culinary manual from yet another Neapolitan chef, Ippolito Cavalcanti.

Time stretches, collapses. Pasta al pomodoro, a foundational dish of Italian cooking, is officially less than two centuries old, and neither of its two main ingredients is native to the region. For like the tomato, pasta secca, the dried pasta that’s the staple of the Italian south — made with durum wheat, higher in protein and more durable than common wheat, which is the basis of the fresh pasta, pasta fresca, exalted by the north — comes from elsewhere: First domesticated in the Fertile Crescent some 10,000 years ago, it was likely brought to Europe by the Arabs who occupied Sicily from the ninth through the 11th centuries. (The Italian food historian Luca Cesari, in his 2023 account, “The Discovery of Pasta: A History in Ten Dishes,” notes among its antecedents the stringlike dough called itrium in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic from the third to fifth centuries A.D.)

Today globalization threatens the uniqueness of local food by making everywhere the same. But without contact between cultures from different parts of the world, much of that food wouldn’t exist in the first place. What is any dish but a sum of migrations and adaptations? “When we talk about food, the subject of identity is often used in an openly reactionary way, to defend our own little garden, close the door to others,” Montanari writes in “Let the Meatballs Rest: And Other Stories About Food and Culture” (2009). To recognize the non-European roots of pasta al pomodoro is to honor, as he describes it, “the other in us.”

A BILLBOARD FLASHES by: “I ♥ Gragnano,” only the heart is a skein of noodles. Five miles south of Sant’Antonio Abate, the town of Gragnano has been devoted to the art of pasta secca since the 1500s and today is host to some of the country’s most recognized brands, including Garofalo and Di Martino. Pure water, low in calcium and thus resulting in a more supple dough, flows down from springs in the Monti Lattari, the mountain range where Abagnale grows his tomatoes. “The early pasta makers of the coast were almost always magicians,” the Italian food historian Oretta Zanini De Vita writes in “Encyclopedia of Pasta” (2009). “They scrutinized the sky, questioned the stars and examined the phases of the moon and the winds” — making pasta when the warm sirocco was blowing from North Africa, gathering moisture as it passed over the Mediterranean and then drying the dough with the coming of the cold tramontana down from the Alps.

The small pastificio (“pasta factory”) Faella stands on a cobblestone lane off a slumbering plaza. From the outside, the building could as easily be a schoolhouse or hotel, with tall doors tucked under concrete arches and little balconies bracketing the windows along the second floor. Gaetano Faella founded the company in 1907, in the days when the dough, a mixture of ground durum wheat and spring water, was pressed by hand through bronze dies into the desired shapes and left in the street to dry, draped over rods of bamboo (a 19th-century introduction from the East). Now everything unfolds indoors. Sergio Cinque, Faella’s 61-year-old great-grandson, runs the factory with the help of eight employees, who include his children, Ornella, 28, and Pierpaolo, 25.

Ornella hands me a smock and a bouffant cap to pull over my hair. At Faella, she explains, they still use bronze dies, which give the pasta a rougher texture, with microscopic crannies for catching sauce, where mass manufacturers might rely on Teflon for quicker extrusion. I follow her into a room with water-streaked windows where noodles cascade from the ceiling over an enormous conical machine, the pasta moving steadily down its sides like lava. The temperature is heady, tropical. When the noodles emerge on the other side, cut to the same length on the blade, they swing from the moving bars like the fringe on a flapper’s dress. The machine is 60 years old, “like my father,” Ornella says. “They were born at the same time.” The American chef Missy Robbins, in her 2021 cookbook, “Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy’s Greatest Food, With Recipes,” attributes the “sturdiness and bite” of Faella’s pasta to this old machinery, which Cinque and his family stay faithful to even though it “means a much slower process with less output,” Robbins writes.

In the next room, fans churn, distributing air over the drying strands. The pasta is given time to dry, sometimes days, at lower temperatures, so it will be less prone to breaking. Ornella notes that bigger companies need to go faster, to produce more, and so often use higher heat and then over-cool, which can cause any water remaining in the dough to crystallize. Among the dozens of shapes of pasta that Faella makes are bucatini in skinny U’s, still holding the curve from where they were hung to dry; little Vesuvios, swirls of dough that rise to flared peaks, in homage to the nearby volcano; and candele, named for their likeness to candles, hollow tubes so long you have to snap them apart by hand — but this they make only once or twice a year, Ornella says, because it requires 60 hours of drying.

It’s a choice: not to hurry, not to pursue ever greater efficiency, not to make more money. All of which goes against the grain of our time, and so it reads like defiance.

SO THOROUGHLY ITALIAN is pasta that outrage greets anyone who attacks or undermines its centrality to Italian life. This was as true in 1986, when protesters at the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome by the 18th-century Spanish Steps bore bowls of penne aloft — chanting, “We don’t want fast food. We want slow food” — as in 1930, when the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a founder of Futurism, which championed a violent break with the past, publicly called for “the abolition of pasta” on the grounds that it was “brutalizing and gross,” “anti-virile” and “no food for fighters.” He called out Neapolitans in particular, who were known across the Italian peninsula starting in the 17th century as mangiamaccheroni, or “macaroni eaters.” (When the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi seized Naples in 1860 as part of the campaign for a unified Italy, one of his compatriots memorialized the event by writing, “The macaroni are cooked and we will eat them,” as Montanari chronicles in his 2010 meditation, “Italian Identity in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation.”) The New York Times reported that Marinetti’s attack “caused a mild revolution in Naples, which rose as one man in defense of the national dish.” But when Giovanni De Riseis, the Duke of Bovino and mayor of Naples, gave voice to that defense, he didn’t speak of pasta alone. He declared, “Gli Angeli, in Paradiso, non mangiano che vermicelli al pomodoro” (“The angels, in heaven, eat nothing but pasta with tomato sauce”).

If there is pasta, there must be tomatoes. But which tomato? Abagnale favors the San Marzano cultivar SMEC-20, recovered in the 1990s after the San Marzano tomato — slender and round-bottomed like a teardrop — was nearly wiped out in the 1960s by a virus and replaced on a number of Italian farms by the Roma hybrid, an American export engineered in Beltsville, Md. Uliassi, in his haute take at his restaurant on the Adriatic Coast, uses piennolos, a variety notably rich in the antioxidant lycopene and egg shaped, with tiny, pointy tails at the blossom ends that evoke whips of meringue. Like the San Marzano, the piennolo holds Protected Designation of Origin status, as granted by the European Union, which means that, of the more than 10,000 varieties of tomatoes on earth, only those of this shape, size, volume, density and porousness may bear the name piennolo, and only if they’re grown in proximity to Mount Vesuvius.

“We can grow these tomatoes elsewhere,” Pasquale Imperato, whose fields lie in the bald sun on the western flank of Vesuvius, says. “But they only have taste if they’re grown here” — nourished by minerals borne by breezes off the sea, their natural sweetness tempered by a gently bitter finish from the sulfur and potassium in the volcanic soil. The piennolo’s thick skin is a kind of armor, to withstand the salt air and rainless summers; it’s a survivor, like Imperato, 54, who runs the only agricultural business left in the town where he lives. Until the 1960s, there was no paved road to his family’s farm. Now a mall stands across the street, anchored by a Decó supermarket. On one side, cars churn through a traffic circle; on the other, a span of highway shimmers.

When he was young, Imperato would help his father gather the harvest at 5 in the morning because by 10 it was so hot, “we had to run away,” he says. He still does almost everything on the farm by hand, including the final arranging of tomatoes for market in heavy bunches like grapes, their stems draped and intertwined around a loop of coarse hemp string — a centuries-old technique to keep them fresh. (“Piennolo” comes from the word for “pendulum” in the Neapolitan language.) Suspended like this, from metal hooks off rust-mottled pipes in a ventilated shed, piennolos can remain fresh for six months or more.

Growing tomatoes in the old way is better for the environment, Imperato believes. More fundamentally, “it is our way of life,” he says. He speaks in the present tense. But in truth, this is no longer the way for most farmers, or for most of us. Ours is the life of the mall and highway; of supermarkets that favor sturdy but pallid mass-produced tomatoes picked early and packed in chambers suffused with ethylene gas to hasten ripening and coax out some approximation of red luster; of our triumphal march of industrialization and globalization, which “has flattened all tastes,” Imperato says.

Against such an inexorable array, it might appear that farmers like him and Abagnale, working small plots of land with limited yields, are doomed idealists, clinging to a lost past and, implicitly, a lost cause. But while modernization has been aligned with the idea of transcending the limits of the local, “moving from a bewildering diversity of maps to a universally shared world” that was broadly legible, administrable and “supracommunal,” as the Russian American cultural theorist Svetlana Boym argues in “The Future of Nostalgia” (2001), more and more we yearn “for the particular” — the irreplaceable and irreplicable idiosyncrasies of person and place; the bright crunch of a taut tomato, say, eaten straight off the field and bursting its seams, a tomato grown in one place by one person at one time that could taste only like this, an earthy-sweet gush and then a lingering, steadying bitterness, reminding you that certain pleasures are worth whatever they cost, and that nothing will ever taste quite like this again. Boym points out that “tradition” and “traitor” share a Latin root, and “revolution” contains within it the possibilities of both change and return. Nostalgia need not be inward looking, melancholy or purely commemorative, with the past glimpsed always at a distance, through the lens of displacement and loss; it can be active and vital, even radical, a salvage operation for the future.

If there is a future. In the summer of 2021, a weather station on the island of Sicily, some 10 hours by ferry from Naples, registered a temperature of 119.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest day in Europe on record. The average temperatures across Italy have risen over the past decade by 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. Tomatoes like warmth but above 95 degrees the plants halt their growth. They pause, assess, wait and see. A 2022 study by agricultural and physical sciences researchers from Italy, Denmark and the United States projects that as temperatures increase, global tomato production might in a worst-case scenario decline by more than half by the end of the century.

Meanwhile, prices for olive oil have soared — in Europe, up to 50 percent higher this January compared to January of last year — as production declines because of weather and disease, with millions of trees in Italy succumbing to the Xylella fastidiosa bacterium, which scientists believe may have been brought over from Costa Rica on a coffee plant in 2008. And in perhaps the most direct hit to the nation’s soul, pasta prices rose so sharply in Italy last year, the government convened emergency talks, and consumer advocates lobbied for a price cap. Later, it was determined that companies were trying to recoup costs from buying marked-up wheat in the early stages of the war in Ukraine, a major producer. Prices stabilized; life has returned to normal. Perhaps pasta, at least, is safe — for now.

AROUND A.D. 39 or so, the Roman historian Suetonius (born later that century) recounts, a bridge was strung across the Bay of Naples. It was more than three miles long, built of boats weighed down by earth, so that the young emperor Caligula could ride atop the water, first on horseback in armor stolen from the tomb of Alexander the Great, and then in a chariot trailed by full military retinue. A tribute to human endeavor, and testament to its limits: Caligula was assassinated not long after, at age 28, and in A.D. 79, Vesuvius exploded. Black torrents of hot gas and ash swept down on the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii, racing at up to 450 miles per hour and reaching temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the surface of Venus, hot enough to crack bones and teeth and vaporize soft tissue, to make of flesh a sifting mist. One skull excavated from Herculaneum was found to contain a dark, translucent substance that, under examination, revealed proteins commonly present in the brain — the human mind, sealed into itself.

“We live in the shadow of Vesuvius,” Amedeo Colella, a 60-year-old local historian who designs food tours of Naples for a company called Culinary Backstreets, tells me. “Even when we speak of the future, we speak in the present tense.” Is this a self-conscious romanticization, or is poetry the only reasonable response to living with a volcano brooding on the horizon? Not to mention, even closer, about nine miles to the west, there’s the increasingly restive supervolcano known as Campi Flegrei (or Burning Fields), much of which lies beneath the Bay of Naples. Half a million people live within an eruption’s immediate reach. In the first 10 months of last year, more than 3,000 small earthquakes sent trembles through the region, raising fears of a coming rupture. The government drew up evacuation plans.

The world ends; the world continues. In Naples, I book a small room in a decaying 17th-century palazzo equipped sometime in the past century with an elevator, which can be operated only by slipping a coin into a slot. There seems to be an open border between past and present. History stalks the Italians I meet. One says, “After all, we were only unified in 1871,” as if this were yesterday. When night falls, I ride through the dark bristling streets on a Vespa, giddy with the cliché of it, prepared to deliver myself to my maker. Italians from elsewhere in the country have informed me that the Neapolitans are the worst drivers on earth, but I think they must be the best, for how else do they cheat death at every turn? And then I realize that what appear to me as near collisions are in fact virtuosic negotiations of space, knowing exactly how close you can get.

In a field in the Monti Lattari where ash descended nearly two millenniums ago, Abagnale lifts a handful of earth. The eruption “created great damage, but it also gave us this,” he says. A cataclysm that took place nearly 1,500 years before the tomato appeared in Italy created the kind of mineral-rich soil that would one day be essential to its thriving, and thus to its eventual union with pasta and the birth of an entire cuisine. Now, at the dining table in Sant’Antonio Abate, we eat. Once “pasta was reserved for feast days,” Zanini De Vita writes. Only after Italy recovered from the tolls of war, when the economy started roaring back to life in the late 1950s and early ’60s, were people in the countryside able to have it whenever they wanted. To think of pasta al pomodoro as a daily, basic dish, to take it for granted: This was a new kind of privilege.

At the end of the meal, we’re supposed to tear off hunks of bread to mop up any sauce still clinging to the plate, a ritual gesture the Italians call scarpetta. It’s a reminder of those days of want, when every mouthful mattered. Abagnale goes one better and brings the giant pan to the table, with the precious dregs like a pulped sunset, and we take our bread and run it through.

Set design by Victoria Petro-Conroy. Retouching: Anonymous Retouch. Digital tech: Lori Cannava. Photo assistant: Karl Leitz. Set designer’s assistant: Natasha Lardera