An old map of the Mediterranean with Sicily and Naples marked, a handful of dried spaghetti, a medieval-style illustration of pasta drying on racks and a modern bag of Gragnano pasta

Marco Polo Did Not Bring Pasta from China

September 9, 2026

One of the most enduring food myths holds that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China when he came home in 1295. It is false in a specific and traceable way. Polo's own book never says he brought pasta home; the passage usually blamed describes a tree from which something like pasta was made, most likely the sago palm. One of the best-known versions of the legend is a story called "A Saga of Cathay" in the October 1929 issue of the Macaroni Journal, the trade magazine of the National Macaroni Manufacturers Association, about a sailor on Polo's voyage named Spaghetti. Food historians have been debunking it for decades.

The real history runs through Norman Sicily, a Genoese notary's office, the streets of Naples and a town between the Gulf of Naples and the Lattari Mountains where pasta dried in the open air.

What existed before Italy

China has archaeological evidence of noodles about four thousand years old, from the Lajia site in northwestern China, and those noodles were made from millet. The researchers who found them said more evidence would be needed to show they were an ancestor of either Asian noodles or Italian pasta. Italian dried pasta is traditionally durum wheat semolina and water, shaped and dried so it keeps, and pasta as a storable food that can travel is the thread the documents let us follow.

Sicily, 1154

The Muslim geographer al-Idrisi worked for the Norman king Roger II, who had summoned him to Palermo, and completed his geography for the king in 1154. In it he described Trabia, a settlement west of Termini with perennial waters that drove several mills, where so much pasta was made that it was exported everywhere, especially to Calabria and to Muslim and Christian lands, by the shipload. That is pasta made commercially and exported by sea, which means it was dried, a century before Marco Polo was born. The Arabic name for those strings, itriyya, passed into local use as tria.

A Genoese will, 1279

The next witness is a will. In 1279 the Genoese notary Ugolino Scarpa drew up the will of a soldier named Ponzio Bastone, which left his heirs, among other things, a container full of macaroni. The document was written while Polo was still in the East, sixteen years before he came home.

Naples, the press and the hungry century

In seventeenth-century Naples two things changed pasta's place in the city. The first was the mechanical press, the torchio, which pushed dough through a die and, with the mechanical kneader, made pasta far cheaper to produce. The second, in the account of the historian Emilio Sereni, was hunger: famine and Spanish misrule made meat scarce, and pasta filled the gap. Neapolitans had been nicknamed mangiafoglia, leaf eaters, in the 1500s; by the end of the 1600s and into the 1700s they were being called mangiamaccheroni, macaroni eaters.

Gragnano, and the wind

Between the Gulf of Naples and the Lattari Mountains, the town of Gragnano had what dried pasta needed: pure spring water and an alternation of sea breezes and mountain air that suited drying. The pasta makers dried their pasta in the open air, and the town was built to channel the breeze through its streets. Its main street, Via Roma, was reshaped to catch the sun and the wind; locals called it 'a ramp' d'o vient, the street of wind. Pasta di Gragnano holds a protected designation today, an IGP granted in 2013, and its rules call for durum wheat semolina, water from the local aquifer and extrusion through bronze dies.

Pasta dies have traditionally been made of bronze, which gives the pasta a rough surface. Teflon dies have since become more widely used; they give pasta a smoother surface. The bronze-die pasta guide and the pasta shapes guide take the subject further.

The timeline, side by side

Set the dated evidence in one column and the myth's chronology falls apart without help.

When	What	Where
About 4,000 years ago	Millet noodles sealed in a bowl at the Lajia site	Northwestern China
1154	Al-Idrisi describes Trabia exporting pasta by the shipload	Sicily
1254	Marco Polo is born	Venice
1279	Ponzio Bastone's will leaves his heirs a container of macaroni	Genoa
1295	Polo returns home	Venice
1600s	The mechanical press, the torchio, spreads pasta production	Naples
Late 1600s to 1700s	Neapolitans become mangiamaccheroni	Naples
October 1929	"A Saga of Cathay" invents the sailor Spaghetti	United States
2013	Pasta di Gragnano receives IGP status	Gragnano

Two gaps tell the story. Sicilian pasta was being shipped abroad 141 years before Polo came home, and Genoa had macaroni in a will 16 years before. The sailor named Spaghetti then arrives 634 years after Polo's return.

Why the myth stuck

It is a good story with a famous name, and its best-known version ran in an American pasta industry trade magazine. The truth is less tidy and more Mediterranean: dried pasta as we know it grew out of Arab, Sicilian, Ligurian and Neapolitan hands between the twelfth century and the nineteenth. Polo's book never claimed the credit.

The ending the myth forgot

The 1929 Macaroni Journal story has an ending that is easy to miss. In the tale, the dry sticks of dough are not good to eat until Spaghetti the sailor thinks of boiling them in sea water, and he learns enough about the food to take it back to Venice. Then the story moves the industry south: in Gragnano, it says, where good water was plentiful, the making of spaghetti grew to a large scale. So the story that sent pasta's origin to China closes in the same town where, by its pasta consortium's account, pasta dried in the open air along its streets in the 1800s. The invented history and the real one end up in the same place.

Two pasta makers

Pastificio Gentile has made pasta in Gragnano since 1876, and the Pastificio Gentile guide tells the family's story. Its long shapes include spaghetti (shop Gentile Spaghetti) and bucatini (shop Gentile Bucatini), the strands at the end of both the true story and the invented one. Rustichella d'Abruzzo has been a family pasta maker in Pianella, near Pescara, since 1924 (see the Rustichella d'Abruzzo guide). Shop the pasta collection for more dried pasta.