[PW] Marco Polo and pasta

[Dennis Lien]

At 10:35 AM 7/21/2008, you wrote:
>About 40 years ago a family friend claimed to have seen a movie in
>which Marco Polo saw spaghetti growing on trees in China and said, "In
>Italy we call it spaghetts!" We didn't believe our friend (she was
>prone to invent such stories), but after reading descriptions of some
>of the bio-pics listed at IMDB, I now suspect that the scene really
>took place. Can anyone confirm this and name the film? It might have
>been "The Adventures of Marco Polo" starring Gary Cooper, or maybe the
>1956 film of the same name (a musical version co-written by Neil
>Simon). At any rate, this scene would seem to suggest that Italians
>already had some form of pasta.


No Marco Polo aspect, but the "spaghetti growing on trees" film is
a famous hoax from 1957:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_tree

Maybe the friend's memory conflated a viewing of this with one of
another Marco Polo film, or maybe somebody did a parody of the hoax...?

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu