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The Italian cuisine is rich and varied in all its aspects, but pasta has been its pride and glory through much of its history. When Italians emigrated, settling throughout America and the rest of the world, they brought their pasta with them. This would made pasta worldwide one of the most endouring symbols of Italian lifestyle and culture.

The origins of pasta are as tangled, however, as spaghetti tossed in a bowl!
Its invention has been attributed to the Etruscans, the Chinese, the Greeks and the Romans, as well as the Arabs. Even though it is a very fascinating history not just for the facts, but also for the many myths and untruths that surround it, I will not go through all the history about pasta. What I would like to do is to understand from where the term “macaroni or maccaroni” comes from and what it means.

In fact the word “maccheroni” (Engl.:macaroni) has an unknown etymology. Italian dictionaries admit the word “maccherone” has obscure origin, suggesting as one possible derivation the Greek word “makaria”, meaning food of the blessed. Another suggestion is that the word derives from “maccare” a now archaic verb meaning "to knead, bruise, batter, crush”." Some historians indeed think Sicilian dialect word "maccaruni" which translates as "made into a dough by force" is the origin of our word, maccaroni. Anyone who has kneaded durum wheat knows that force is necessary. In the ancient methods of making pasta, force meant kneading the dough with the feet, often a process that took a full day.
The huge Italian immigration that entered the US around the 1900's which brought the popular pasta dishes mostly from the Sicily and Campania areas, could explain why the term “macaroni” entered in everyday English-American speech and from there spread all over the world except Italy!

Actually in Italian language the word “macaroni” does not exist because it was a southern dialectal form.
At some point around the 12th or 13th century in Italy the word “maccaroni” came to mean “pasta secca” (dried pasta) of any shape, which specified dried versus fresh pasta, “pasta fresca”.
It was only in the second half of the 15th century that the term “maccheroni” [mak-kay-ro-nee] came to mean a tube-shape.
Nowdays in Italy to refer to dried pasta we simply say: “pasta” and the word maccheroni indicates just a tube-shape of pasta 5 to 20 cm long (picture on top-left).
What you find in any supermarket all over the world wrongly named “macaroni”, in Italy is known as “chifferini” [keef-fay-ree-nee] (picture on the right).

What is historically important about the invention of pasta, the sine qua non of its definition, is that it is made, by Italian statute, with a particular type of wheat flour, Triticum durum (commonly known as hard wheat, semolina, or durum wheat). This wheat is mixed with water to form an alimentary paste that is dried, then stored for long periods of time and cooked by boiling or (less commonly) steaming in or over water or broth. This particular kind of wheat is unique because of its high gluten and low moisture content, which distinguishes it in a significant way from soft wheat or bread wheat (Triticum aestivum).
The basic division of pasta is into two major categories: egg pastas (including all filled pastas such as ravioli, tortellini or agnolotti) and hard wheat semolina pastas. The latter are further subdivided into short pasta (rigatoni, penne, fusilli, etc.) and long pasta (spaghetti, vermicelli, tagliatelle, etc.), either grooved or smooth.
It is impossible to list all the name of all the various forms of pastas, especially since the same shape could easily have a different name in a town ten miles away!