T’s May 19 Travel issue is dedicated to pasta in Italy, diving deep into the culinary traditions, regional variations and complicated history of the country’s national symbol. Click here for a field guide to stuffed pasta, as an accompaniment to this article. FOR MUCH OF Italy’s history, ravioli was a luxury reserved for banquet tables or feast days. All pasta was a rarefied food in the Middle Ages, but few forms captured the popular imagination as completely as stuffed pasta, considered the noblest of the species. The “Encyclopedia of Pasta” (2009), the Italian food historian Oretta Zanini De Vita’s decades-long effort to catalog Italy’s most popular food, identifies more than 80 types of pasta ripiena (“stuffed pasta”), allowing for countless variations.

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Persons: T’s, ravioli, ”, Giovanni Boccaccio, Florentines, del, Oretta Zanini De Locations: Italy