Who invented pasta? As a kid, you learned it was the Italians. As a slightly older kid, you found out that it only became an “Italian thing” when Marco Polo returned from the Far East with these unusual things called “noodles”, so it was probably the Chinese that invented pasta. Maybe it was the Arab invaders who brought a pasta predecessor to The Boot during the 8th century, or the Greeks who settled in Naples before Polo was even alive. Whether Italians invented pasta or not isn’t really my point. The point is, once the nonnas got their hands on pasta, it was game over.