Italians Really Do Eat Spaghetti and Meatballs
The original Abruzzese spaghetti and meatballs balances tiny pallottine with robust chitarra pasta.
In Abruzzo, we learned the ancient origins of this all-American pasta
Giovanni Iezzi strums his fingers across the taut wire guitar strings, filling his sawdust-caked workshop with a delicate, vibrating twang. “Che melodia,” he says, then strums the instrument again. “Che melodia!” What a melody!
Except Iezzi isn’t a musician and the shoebox-sized instrument he’s holding isn’t a guitar, at least not in the conventional sense. It’s a chitarra—which, confusingly, translates from Italian as guitar—one he spent the last 45 minutes crafting for me from bits of beechwood, a few bolts, a handful of tiny brass nails and fiber-thin wire made just for this purpose.
I’d come to Pretoro—a medieval Italian village of about 800 people tucked into and up the hills of Abruzzo, a mountainous region wedged between Rome and the Adriatic Sea—to better understand the chitarra, a romantic, if somewhat clunky, almost harp-like tool used to make a rough-hewn, square-sided, spaghetti-like pasta of the same name.
But the real (and most delicious) lesson I’d learn in those hills is the unexpected and hidden truth about that most American—and supposedly least Italian—of classic Italian American dishes we all grew up with: spaghetti and meatballs.
Predictably, we’ve got it all wrong.
THE MYTH
Conventional wisdom holds that spaghetti and meatballs is an Italian American creation. Real Italians—those living in Italy, that is—don’t know it and don’t eat it. Bathing meatballs in tomato sauce, then ladling them onto platters of spaghetti simply isn’t done. And that’s true. From a certain point of view.
To understand that, we need to look at immigration patterns. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, several million Italians left Italy to immigrate to the United States. Many of them were from southern Italy, places like Naples and Sicily. Their culinary norms came to define what we consider “real Italian” cooking, even if they changed over time here in the U.S.
For context, pasta in much of Italy—however sauced—is a primo, or first course. There may be meat in the sauce, but it mostly is a flavoring, not the main event. A bit of guanciale for richness, for example. Meat, including marinara-drenched meatballs, is served separately as a secondo, or main course. East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.
Things changed as Italians adapted to life in the U.S. Meat and money were more abundant than in the old country. And most culinary historians credit New York’s Italian community with marrying large, Neapolitan-style meatballs to the pasta course. But that’s not really where the story begins. Because real Italians, it turns out, very much eat pasta and meatballs.
THE TOOL
Like most people in Abruzzo, Iezzi grew up eating a dish called pasta alla chitarra con pallottine, or to put it less lyrically, pasta made on a chitarra and served with tiny balls of meat. He never thought it would become his life’s work.
His father was a woodworker who made mortai e pestelli, or elaborately decorated wooden mortars and pestles. Iezzi followed him into the trade, but focused on chairs, which he sold at markets around the region. That is, until online shopping and chain stores cut into his business so severely it no longer was viable. That was about 20 years ago.
Making chitarras started as a fun challenge. He didn’t know anyone else doing it, yet plenty of people used them to make the region’s signature pasta, best described as thick spaghetti with squared edges. Demand built and hit especially hard during the pandemic. Today, he builds 1,500 chitarras a month and says it’s never enough.
“I’d like to make many other things, but I just don’t have the time,” he says. “No one else wants to do this.”
A chitarra basically is a rectangular box without a top or bottom. Two sturdy end pieces are held in place by four horizontal rails, and the wire is wrapped in parallel lines end to end across the top and bottom, narrower spacing on one side, wider on the flip. The difference allows the cook to decide how wide to make their pasta, spaghetti thin or fettuccine thick.
An assortment of antiquated machines helps Iezzi rout, cut, trim and plane each piece of the chitarra, a 15-step process to assemble. The most cumbersome part is the stringing of the wire, all done by hand. It’s a lot of work, and it’s a dying art; his children won’t continue the business. “In five or six years when I have to stop, all of these machines will be thrown out,” he says.
The origins of the chitarra are a bit muddled, but most date its creation to the mid-1800s, a time when Germans introduced thin steel wire to Italy and some clever folks then figured out how to use it to cut pasta (until then, it mostly had been cut by hand with a knife or rolling pin etched with dozens of ridges and grooves).
And the name, despite its musical affinity, probably actually comes from the French “carrer,” or to square. However created and named, the chitarra took off, becoming so culturally important in Abruzzo it was part of a woman’s dowry in marriage.
Which explains the pasta. The meatballs? Also a muddle. But Abruzzo has a long tradition of raising sheep for milk and meat, and meat is consumed more often here—and more abundantly—than further south. Abruzzo also enjoys a long coastline, adding ample seafood to the cuisine. All of which at least partly explains why pasta here is paired more often and more abundantly with meat and seafood than in other regions of Italy.
THE PASTA
Maria di Marino is equal parts curt and cozy. Standing at her kitchen table in front of her flickering fireplace—her husband sitting nearby, patiently waiting for his lunch—she starts her pasta by using the side of her hand to cut the sign of the cross into the mound of flour on the table. “I do that to make sure it comes out good,” she explains.
She is 88, a retired teacher, and is showing me how to make chitarra pasta using the chitarra her mother had cooked with since long before di Marino was born. So it’s got some mileage on it. In short order, six eggs and 600 grams of flour come together into a golden-hued dough. After a brief rest—for herself and the dough—she divides it in half and begins rolling.
Four hundred kilometers north in Bologna, cooks are instructed to roll their pasta so thin you could see Basilica di San Luca through it. And they take that seriously. Here in Pretoro, just a few hundred yards from Iezzi’s workshop, if you want to see the local church, you’ll do better to look through di Marino’s window. Pasta in Abruzzo is rolled much thicker.
When the mound of dough has been rolled to the size of a large pizza, di Marino cuts it into 6-inch-wide sheets, just shy of the width of her mother’s chitarra. One at a time, she lays each sheet over the chitarra’s thinly spaced wires, then presses and rolls a wooden pin over it. It doesn’t happen as quickly as you’d expect, but in about 10 seconds, lines appear on the pasta. A few seconds later, those lines become perforations. A few seconds more, and the perforations become cuts.
When di Marino strums the chitarra with her fingertips, thick noodles fall onto the table. Perfectly formed, squared-off strands of thick pasta. She repeats the process with each sheet until she has a heaped mound of pasta substantial enough to feed us all. Meanwhile, a simple tomato sauce simmers in a terra-cotta pot on the stove.
Honestly, it seems like a fussy, time-consuming way to make pasta. Surely, a knife would make faster—if slightly irregular—work of it. But after it’s boiled and sauced, the rationale becomes evident. The chitarra produces pasta with a particularly coarse texture, even more so than pastas extruded through bronze dies. Those rough edges are exceptionally good at catching sauce and holding it tight. They also excel at leaching starch, the secret to perfectly thickened sauces.
The value of all this is clear when di Marino brings sauce and pasta together. The result is hearty and satisfying in ways that seem too good to be true. Equal parts tender and robust, the pasta drags the sauce with it. No pooling at the bottom of the bowl. Those who enjoy sopping up excess sauce with a hunk of bread will be sorely disappointed. I’m OK with that.
THE MEATBALLS
To see how all this plays out with meatballs and marinara, I head to Pescara, a city along Abruzzo’s coast. Luisa Carinci—whose home is stacked with antique cooking equipment, including weathered pasta boards and multiple chitarras—explains that she grew up eating pasta alla chitarra con pallottine. So did her husband. “I had to learn it even if I didn’t want to,” she says with a laugh.
To make the meatballs, Carinci uses ingredients that should feel familiar to any Italian food-loving American—ground beef, eggs, breadcrumbs, grated Parmesan cheese, nutmeg, salt, pepper and parsley. The mixture comes together quickly and without fuss. Same for the sauce. A soffritto of celery, carrot and onion cooked in olive oil, then crushed tomatoes and not much else.
The forming of the meatballs is where things diverge. Carinci pinches off tiny bits of the meat mixture, forming each into a gumball. Unlike large Neapolitan meatballs, which are meant to be eaten solo with a fork and knife, pallottine—which also go by a confusing array of other names, including polpettine—are intended to be forked up with mouthfuls of pasta. And for that to work, they need to be small.
Some people make them even smaller, Carinci explains. But she prefers them to be about ½ inch each. Otherwise, you might as well just make ragù, and we’re in the wrong region for that.
Now where Americans might fuss over how to brown the meatballs, the Abruzzesi prefer to just get on with it. They are dumped directly into that simple marinara to simmer for a few minutes. And because they are so small, a few minutes is plenty. This clearly matters: The short cooking time is enough to infuse the sauce with meaty flavor but sufficiently brief to leave the meatballs tender and light, rather than the dry and tough golf balls we know best.
Now back to that marriage of rough-cut pasta and saucy meatballs. The best versions I ate in Abruzzo did this in a skillet over medium heat. That mattered, too, as this gave the sauce additional time to reduce and the pasta a chance to release more starch into it. The result was thickly sauced noodles studded with tender, tiny meatballs.
When I tasted it all together—dusted, of course, with a bit of grated Parmesan—I won’t lie ... It was like your favorite childhood spaghetti and meatballs, except they’d matured in very delicious ways. True to Carinci’s promise, it was easier to eat, each mouthful a balance of thick noodles and tender meatballs, each sized just right for the other.
It was immediately familiar and yet entirely new. All of which makes me very happy to know that real Italians really do eat spaghetti and meatballs.
