Smooth or ribbed, long or short, pasta is a “machine” designed to “capture” the sauce, to hold it, to transport it in the proper quantity to the mouth, to define the flavor of the recipe. The ribbings increase the surface area, to extend the staying power of the sour or sweet notes of the various seasonings; the loops catch small fragments of flavor; the spirals withhold and amplify the density of sauces. Pasta was created as a carrier of sauces, and there are no limits to it in this marvelous vocation. And Italian gastronomic tradition, so widely varied in its regional and territorial products, offers an extraordinary wealth of combinations, worthy of being proposed a new for an international audience, to respond to the hasty and quotidian repetitiveness resulting in unchanging cuisine. Thus was born the idea for a new book on pasta, the fruit of Academia Barilla’s gastronomic experience and of Barilla’s centuries-old technological competencies, to promote 360° knowledge about pasta, giving value to the extraordinary variety of the formats produced today in Italy — at least 300 — combining them in simple and varied preparations, each one tested and experimented with by the chefs at Academia Barilla, along with text and suggestions for excellence in the final result. The volume, large in format and with a carefully-designed editorial program, is structured using the individual formats as the basis. It presents their technical and physical characteristics; reports origins of their names and brief historical annotations, rich with significance; suggests ideal combinations with sauces and seasonings; and proposes traditional recipes from Italian gastronomy, splendidly illustrated using images produced during the preparation. A different and original point of view for discovering how much originality — and taste — is hidden behind a plate of pasta