Thursday, February 02, 2006
BEEN READING AGAIN A dangerous habit, I know.
A pair of sentences from Peter Spufford's excellent POWER AND PROFIT: THE MERCHANT IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE that seem worth passing along:
The earliest surviving references to pasta in Italy come only from the thirteenth century, but by the fourteenth many different kinds were being made. Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, in his Cronaca Fiorentina, which covers the years 1362 to 1385, uses a vivid simile when he reports that the burial of the dead in a mass grave during a visitation of the plague, first a layer of earth, then a layer of bodies, then another layer of earth, then another was 'just like lasagne'.
