The private life of pasta

In this episode, we reveal that Marco Polo did not bring spaghetti back from China and that the Arabs brought it with them when they invaded Sicily in the late 12th century. John Dickie takes us to a pasta factory and learns how to operate an antique screw press to make pasta by hand. He shows how a King's bad manners may have led to the invention of a four-pronged fork. He also exposes the role played by pasta in politics, from the 18th century when it could be used to quiet an unruly mob to the mid 20th, when politicians would buy votes in Naples.