Left: postcard of street scene

Natasha Lavattiata (no stranger herself to Italian culture) enjoys a great show at the Estorick

Pasta: Italian Culture on a Plate, is currently at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art - from Wednesday 26 June to Sunday 15 September, 2002.

Pasta to the Italians is what tea is to the English - it has been around for ages and is consumed by rich and poor alike (it also reminds each of home.)

Before this exhibition, I thought there was only a lot of different pasta shapes. The truth of the matter is that nobody knows the exact amount. Angel hairs, little devils, butterflies, worms, bow ties, priest stranglers, tongues, ears, twins, flying saucers… the list of shapes is never ending.

Right: Zaro poster

Great designers began to get in on the act of pasta design. Industrial designer for Fiat and Alfa Romeo, Giorgetto Giugiaro, in 1983 designed a new pasta shape called 'Marille'. This looked like an ocean's wave. However it was not a success and subsequently withdrawn from the market.

Paul Priestman designs the futuristic 'Dropple' pasta shape especially for the exhibition. British functionality at its best - the Dropple holds the sauce on each side. But as novelist Olivia Mannins states, "who else but Italians would invest such passion and imagination in mere dough?"

We also learn that 14th century painter Boccaccio liked his cooked with milk and almonds.

Left: Barilla pasta catalogue

"Cherchez la femme avec la pasta," is one of the sayings in Enzo Apicella's enormous hand-painted map of Italy - which is the first thing you see when entering. Translated - look for the woman with the pasta. This is not too far away, because in the next room is an even bigger picture of actress Sophia Loren enjoying a plate of pasta.

One might think the exhibition is a little too biased towards Barilla; the same room houses what seems to be an archive of the pasta company through the ages. It has posters and television adverts echoing their famous slogan - "Dove c'e Barilla c'e casa." Translated - where there's Barilla, there's home.

Right: caught in the act! Marinetti exposed as a pasta eater.

However, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti believed pasta to be heavy, brutalising and gross. "Its nutritive qualities deceptive… induces scepticism, sloth and pessimism." Then in 1930 was caught on camera eating a plate of spaghetti at Biffi - a restaurant in Milan.

But a previous Mayor of Naples in total contradiction to Marinetti said, " In heaven angels ate nothing but vermicelli (worm shaped pasta) in tomato sauce."

Left: does good food grow on trees? Spagetti production in Naples.

Again in the second gallery is the most absurd sight - a pasta tree. It is a tribute to the practical joke made by Richard Dimbleby at the end of a Panorama broadcast in 1957. He suggested enjoying an unusually heavy pasta crop and women were shown gathering pasta from the floor. Many people believed him: it reveals how exotic pasta still was in England in the 1950s.

It was Elizabeth David who introduced dyed durum wheat - main food of southern Italy for 1000 years - to England. There is a copy of a 1952 edition of Harpers Bazaar, showing the first pasta recipe in England by Ms David.