Pasta from Baghdad

The Italian city of Lucca wants to protect pasta and pizza from foreign influences and ban sushi and kebabs. The daily Trouw asks how Italian Italy's cuisine really is: "The caliphate of Baghdad created the first enduring food legacy between the 9th and 11th century: spaghetti. This hard dry pasta was made from a special kind of wheat – durum – which at that time didn't grow in Italy. … The tomato is another icon that even today remains inseparably bound up with Italian cuisine. But the tomato, too, was once an exotic fruit. It was only after the discovery of America by Columbus (a true Italian) that the Spanish brought tomatoes to Europe for the first time in 1523. … And the same goes for capsicums, pepper, potatoes and chocolate. These are all products that only became cornerstones of Italian cuisine in the course of centuries. So it is indeed an international cuisine in the truest sense of the word. If there's one thing that really is open to international influences it's food."

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