The concept of Mediterranean Diet has been recently adopted to describe a diet resulting from thirty centuries of evolution of the Mediterranean area. Since the dawn of the Mediterranean civilisation, Greeks and Romans made an effort to ensure tasty but healthy meals. Their diet was founded on three basic plants – wheat, olive and vine – completed by pulses, fruit and vegetables, milk and cheese, much fish and some meat. Thus it was possible to obtain a diet rich of energy and able to help preventing arteriosclerosis with no sacrifice of taste at all! “Inde domum me ad porri et ciceris referro laganique catinum”, wrote Horace in the Saturae: “Then I go home to have a meal of lasagne with chick-peas and leeks”; a traditional recipe of Magna Graecia. Indeed, pasta was produced and sold all over Italy since the Middle Age. The ships of Genoa in 1300 had a “master of lasagne” on board to cook for the sailormen. Up to the early sixteenth century, Genoa was the main place for production and commerce of pasta. In Naples, pasta was occasionally made at home, as a cake, dressed with honey and cinnamon, and was not considered a daily dish but one for special events. In 1509, in Sicily, the production of tubular pasta, called “maccaroni”, was started. Naples imported pasta from Genoa and Palermo till to the end of the sixteenth century, when pasta manufacturing was organised by the royal industry. In 1546, the Neapolitan Corporation of the spaghetti makers was established, followed, at a short distance, by that of “macaroni”. An official report in 1689 highlighted the diffusion of pasta, grown up to be part of the daily diet of the Neapolitans. The reason was the evolution from the home-making to a semi-industrial craftsmanship. This change was enabled by the invention of the mixing machine and of the draw-plate for the spaghetti. Thus, Naples quickly became the leader in making pasta. Even the basic recipes increased in number, being pasta part of the official dishes of the Royal Court. Since 1830, tomato sauce olive oil and fresh garlic were added to the pasta. Soon this became the flag of the Mediterranean Diet. In our century, a scientific approach gave a big contribution to the culture of the pasta. In the 50s, a team of American researchers, who were studying the causes of heart diseases, discovered the value of the Mediterranean Diet. They verified that a test group of Neapolitan firemen assumed the twenty per cent of their daily calories as fats, against the forty per cent of their American colleagues; they showed a very low incidence of coronary disease and an average level of blood cholesterol of only 165 mg. Nowadays, those people who experienced the pleasure of the home-made vegetable soup with one of the hundreds kinds of pasta, the use of bread without butter and that of fresh vegetables described this diet as the happiest in the world.