The production of pasta, meanwhile, began to climb the boot, moving throughout southern Italy and Liguria, where the dry and windy climate favored drying in the open air: Gragnano, Torre Annunziata, but also Puglia. The rest of Italy, for climatic reasons, remained linked to the production of egg pasta, not dried and probably born from the contamination with the Roman “lagana”. But pasta, although widespread, was not yet a mass dish.
It will become so only in the 600s, in the Neapolitan city, the largest in Europe, where demographic overcrowding and Spanish fiscalism led the population to hunger thereafter the consumption of meat and bread collapsed. So the population turned to pasta, which the producers made cheaper thanks to a technological revolution. Already in the eighteenth century the Neapolitans earned the title of “mangia-maccheroni” (epithet already reserved for Sicilians) and also in the rest of Italy pasta became a national symbol, a poor and popular dish par excellence. In those years, in Naples, the inseparable companion of pasta, tomato sauce, was invented. “The macaroni are cooked, and we will eat them,” Cavour will write on the eve of the annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies while, for the first time, Italy was made.