# The Tragedy Behind Italy's Most Famous Pasta Dish > Discover the story of the legendary amatriciana sauce and the tragedy of Amatrice, the town shattered by an earthquake: a flavor carrying real memory. - URL: https://langandtrip.com.ua/en/article/amatrichana-istoriia-lehendarnoho-sousu-ta-trahediia-mista-amatriche-pislia-zemletrusu/ - Language: en - Published: 2024-01-17 - Categories: Culture, Historic Sites, Restaurants, Italy, Food & Drinks --- Which Italian pasta sauce is the best? Ask that question in the homeland of spaghetti and tortellini and you might just start a fight. Is it the meaty, slow cooked ragu from Bologna, so famous that half the planet has butchered it and renamed it "bolognese"? The nutty basil pesto from Liguria? Or maybe carbonara, a full on carb hit of pasta cloaked in an eggy sauce with cheese and shards of pecorino? Maybe it's a red sauce. For plenty of people, a good plate of pasta needs tomatoes, and for those people, amatriciana is the sauce that outshines all the rest. A rich, sweet tomato sauce seasoned with guanciale (an especially fragrant bacon made from pork cheek), warmed with plenty of pepper or chili, and finished with pecorino that gives it body: this is one of the classics. But while fans around the world treat amatriciana as their carb loaded comfort blanket, the recent history of this dish has been a tragic one. ## A Devastating Earthquake ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-2-1-2024.jpg) The dish is believed to have been invented in the town of Amatrice, in Lazio, the central Italian region that is also home to Rome. But while Rome sits on the western side, Amatrice lies 90 miles to the northeast, closer to Italy's eastern coast, tucked into a basin in the Apennine Mountains. It borders the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park, which stretches across 150,000 hectares and spans three regions of central and southern Italy. The park is one of the largest protected areas in Europe, known for its golden eagles, brown bears, and the southernmost glacier on the continent. But in recent years, the area around the park has been at the heart of Italy's earthquakes. In 2009, a quake near the town of L'Aquila, an hour's drive south of Amatrice, claimed 308 lives and left around 65,000 people homeless. The town is still rebuilding to this day. And in October 2016, Norcia, an hour's drive northwest of Amatrice, was struck by a magnitude 6.6 earthquake whose tremors were felt across the country, from Rome to Venice, 260 miles from the epicenter. It, too, has yet to fully recover. ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-2-2-2024.jpg) Amatrice's turn came on 24 August 2016, at 3:36 in the morning. In 142 seconds, a magnitude 6 earthquake on the Richter scale flattened almost the entire town, along with the neighboring settlements of Arquata del Tronto, Pescara del Tronto, and the epicenter, Accumoli. 299 people died, and four more victims passed away later. Most of the dead were in Amatrice. "Amatrice no longer exists," the then mayor Sergio Pirozzi told reporters that morning. Nearly 400 people were injured, and 41,000 lost their homes. Four years on, most are still living in temporary housing. ## Still In Ruins, But Still Cooking ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-2-3-2024.jpg) Today, little has changed. The town center, or what's left of it, is a zone controlled by the army, where foot traffic is forbidden. Climbing what was once a beautiful main street, Corso Umberto I, only a handful of buildings remain, propped up by scaffolding: a pair of bell towers, the vaulted shell of a church. Beyond the old town there are more buildings held up by scaffolding; others that seem to have survived or been restored; and temporary huts where the rest of the town's residents live and do their shopping. A statue of the 16th century painter and architect Cola dell'Amatrice has been restored and stands at the edge of the disaster zone, next to a sign banning selfies. And on what used to be the outskirts of town sits a cluster of stylish modern buildings, hastily built around a pseudo square. The Area del Gusto, della Tradizione e della Solidarieta (Area of Taste, Tradition, and Solidarity) was designed in 2017 by architect Stefano Boeri, the creator of Milan's world famous "vertical forest." ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-2-4-2024.jpg) Ringed by green mountains, this space brought together the town's remaining restaurants. And amatriciana holds a place of honor here. Museums and churches may be in ruins, but thousands of tourists still come to Amatrice to taste its most famous pasta dish. And even in a dressed up shed, it's still one of the most memorable meals you can have in Italy. ## Your Favorite Plate Of Spaghetti, At The Source At Ristorante La Conca, Elisabetta Perilli doesn't have a printed menu. Instead, she tells you what's available, and all of it is what Italians call "chilometro zero," meaning produce sourced from the local area. To start, an excellent choice is a plate of local cured meats and salami: Norcia, an hour's drive away, is world renowned for its cured ham. ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-2-5-2024.jpg) But after that, there's only one dish tourists want to try: spaghetti all'amatriciana. So what makes it different from the amatriciana we eat around the world? At La Conca, the Perilli family uses spaghetti with a square cross section instead of a round one, because it gives the sauce more surface area to soak into. The pasta also has a rough texture rather than a smooth one, so the sauce clings to it more easily. ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-2-6-2024.jpg) And if you're used to amatriciana with a fiery chili kick, you'll be surprised, because here, although they do add chili, most of the heat comes from ordinary pepper. That makes the dish less spicy than the one you may be used to, but smoother and warmer, almost with a hint of nutmeg. That warmth spreads through your mouth as you eat. It's subtler than the amatriciana you might know, and it's masterful. As for the guanciale, Perilli says the most important thing is that it must be pure. The family used to make it themselves, but like everyone else here, they lost their animals and their curing facilities in the earthquake. Today they buy their guanciale from a nearby producer. ## The Aftermath Of The Earthquake ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-2-7-2024.jpg) Like everyone else in Amatrice, the Perilli family was hit hard by the earthquake. Their home in the town center was completely destroyed, as was their restaurant, which her father, Gabriele, opened in the 1950s and which was popular with Italian celebrities, including the singer Adriano Celentano. "You should have seen our restaurant," she says, pointing to a photo of Celentano with Gabriele, who had a cameo in his film "Serafino," on the wall. "We had photographs everywhere. It was more beautiful." Even so, she calls her family "lucky," because they had land, so they built two wooden chalets to live in, rather than moving to the village of prefabricated houses where other residents from the town center relocated. And the slow bureaucracy of the rebuilding process means residents don't know whether their homes will ever be rebuilt, or when that might happen. ![](/storage/image/prev/july-article-image-2-8-2024.jpg) "Those of us who had homes in the center still don't know whether they'll be rebuilt in the center or moved outside it," she says. "We went from a peaceful town to a catastrophe." "The town right now is a construction site. We can't walk there. Our homes were destroyed, and we can't visit the places where they stood. There's nothing there." After the earthquake, residents were allowed to return to what was left of their homes to see if they could salvage any belongings. Then the town was fenced off and declared a military zone. Residents can drive through it, but they can't stop, can't get out, and can't visit the places where their homes once stood. ## Kitchen Secrets The secret to an excellent amatriciana, according to the Perilli family: make sure the guanciale is pure, and cook it together with the rest of the sauce, using the meat's fat to fry the mixture instead of cooking the vegetables in olive oil first. There's just one problem. According to Elisabetta, ordering amatriciana in Amatrice is what gives you away as a tourist. The true dish of Amatrice, she says, is spaghetti alla gricia, a 'white' (tomato free) amatriciana whose only ingredients are guanciale, pepper, and pecorino cheese. It's thought to be the original dish of Amatrice, to which residents only added tomatoes in the 19th century. The fame of these dishes, even though both gricia and amatriciana originated here and are closely tied to Rome, meant that Italians rallied to support Amatrice after the earthquake. "We were lucky," says Perilli. "People donated and gave us a chance to start over." The Area del Gusto was built with donations gathered by the newspaper Corriere della Sera and the TV channel L7, and it allows the residents who stayed, because many of those who could left, to earn a living again. "This summer we had fewer people, but many Italians on holiday come here. There are no hotels left, but they come for lunch," says Perilli.