The simple act of combining flour and water, shaping the resulting dough, and cooking it has been practiced in Italy for a few thousand years, if we assume that the Greeks who settled in Sicily and South Italy brought recipes like lagana (an ancient pasta recipe) with them. Since then, pasta has taken many forms, although it wasn’t universally adopted in Italy (some places, like Venice, didn’t incorporate pasta into their everyday cuisine until the twentieth century, and still prefer corn-based polenta). Thanks in part to the industrialization of dried pasta making beginning in the late nineteenth century, and its nationalization under the Fascist regime in the 1920s, Italians today eat pasta in every region, and it is a touchstone of Italian national identity.

While some islands embraced pasta just a century ago, Sicily and Sardinia were a millennium ahead of the game. North African conquerors and merchants introduced shapes like itriyya (thin dried noodles), which were manufactured and exported near Palermo in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, dried granules of durum wheat pasta, variants of couscous, provided portable and minimally perishable food on the islands. A descendant of this dried pasta called cùscusu locally is a staple in western Sicily to this day, where you may find it fresh for immediate consumption or dried for later use. In Sardinia, you’ll see fregula, which resembles Israeli or pearl couscous. It is incredibly popular on the island, where it is served with brothy seafood or vegetable dishes.

When we eat island pastas, we are honoring a tradition that predates modern Italy by about one thousand years. The medieval pasta factories that made pasta for local consumption as well as export foreshadowed the industrial boom in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when large pasta factories were born around Naples and began to mass produce and distribute dried pasta shapes like spaghetti and smooth tubular shapes all over the Bay of Naples, then the country, and ultimately the world.

Around the mid-twentieth century, after its initial nationwide introduction during the Facist period, dried pasta began to enter communities where pasta had previously been a holiday luxury. Dried pasta can last years on the shelf and, not insignificantly, liberated Italian women from having to mix, roll, and shape fresh pasta daily. Fresh pasta, which will only last up to a week, is popular in Sardinia, where intricate shapes are made by hand in labor-intensive, almost meditative processes, a cultural phenomenon perhaps best demonstrated by su filindeu, culurgiones, and lorighittas.

There’s a lot of passionate debate outside of Italy about whether fresh pasta is better than dried pasta. I, like most Italians, would argue that it depends on the shape and the maker. Fresh pasta isn’t necessarily better just because it is made by hand—often it’s not better. It requires skill to master. Dried pasta, on the other hand, is challenging to perfect at home or even in a restaurant. Yet the texture and flavor of the great dried pasta brands like Benedetto Cavalieri in Puglia; Pastificio dei Campi, Faella, and Setaro in Campania; and Mancini in Le Marche is excellent. They all produce slow-dried pasta shapes in a time-honored tradition that contrasts with the flash-dried shapes made by Barilla and the like. Slow-dried pasta shapes have no rivals, fresh or dried, in terms of texture and structure. When it comes to dried pasta, leave it to those companies, but for the fresh stuff, get started making it at home today!