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Pasta in Italy seems steeped in tradition, with time-honored recipes handed down through the generations. Any change would be sacrilegious. At least that’s what James Beard Award-winner Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful food podcast and inventor of the cascatelli pasta shape, thought when he set out to create a cookbook of nontraditional pasta sauces, entitled Anything’s Pastable. But on a research trip across Italy he was shocked to learn that pasta did not become the country’s national food until about a hundred years ago, and iconic dishes like carbonara were just invented in the 1940’s. Others, like the city of Bari’s spaghetti all’assassina, are even newer, and continue to evolve.

On this 9-day Pasta Pilgrimage in Naples, Puglia and Rome, you’ll retrace Dan’s steps, eating at many of the same places where he ate and with many of the same people – including Dan himself, who will join the trip for several action-packed days!

Along the way you’ll experience both the delicious traditions of Italian pasta culture, and the new ideas, giving you a deeper appreciation for the full breadth of pasta history and culture, as well as a taste of pasta dishes that even many Italians haven’t heard of.

You’ll eat pasta in Roman institutions with local expert Katie Parla, and don hairnets for a visit to the factory floor of a 16th-century pasta producer in a small village near Naples, where the local air is considered a key ingredient. We’ll visit the “vault” of one pasta-maker where the brass dies of the extruders are kept safe, and sample the local tomatoes of Vesuvius, a key ingredient in the Neapolitan ragu we’ll learn to make in the kitchen of a Neapolitan nonna. Then, in another kitchen across town, we’ll see and taste how a Sri Lankan immigrant chef is adapting flavors of his new home into unique pasta recipes. In Puglia’s Bari, you’ll visit the “orecchiette ladies,” who roll out pasta all day in front of their homes, before Dan takes you on an investigative pasta crawl in search of his favorite version of spaghetti all’assassina (assassin’s spaghetti). Down in Lecce, deep in the Puglian heartland, you’ll spend the day cooking with chef and teacher Silvestro Silvestori, who runs his own cooking school. As we make our way on this trip from the Italian capital to the far reaches of pasta’s homeland, you’ll spend time with those upholding pasta tradition as well as those pushing this iconic dish into new realms, proving that indeed anything’s pastable.