Here below you can find our favourite top 10 Italian pasta dishes. There are Italian pasta recipes for every diet: meat eater, pescatarian, vegetarian and vegan.
Table of contents
Top 10 Italian pasta recipes
- Spaghetti alla carbonara. This tasty recipe is made with egg yolk, bacon, parmesan cheese, roman grated cheese, EVO oil and black pepper. Where to eat it: in Rome or Roman restaurants in other cities.
- Difficulty: easy. Tip: the egg sauce is uncooked, it’s just egg yolk mixed with grated parmesan cheese and romano cheese. Add this sauce to the pan with the pasta and the shallow fried bacon after you put off the heat otherwise the egg will cook and become solid.
- Penne all’arrabbiata 🌱. This is a spicy pasta recipe made with tomato sauce with addition of hot chili pepper. If you like hot dishes this is simple and tasty, it’s also vegetarian and vegan.
- Pasta alla puttanesca 🐟. This pescatarian pasta is made with anchovies, tomato, capers, olives, onion.
- Pappardelle al ragù 🐖. Sometimes called spaghetti bolognese, but in Italy they are called tagliatelle al ragù or tagliatelle with meat sauce. Tagliatelle are flat spaghetti, generally the tagliatelle dough is made with egg yolk.
- Spaghetti allo scoglio 🦐, which means reef pasta, is a spaghetti dish with a sauce made with shellfish, clams, prawns, mussels. It can be with a little tomato, to give it a bit of color. There are many different executions of this recipe and they are all tasty.
- Spaghetti alle vongole. You can taste all the flavours of Italian spaghetti and fresh clams in this simple but very tasty recipe. You can make it at home as well in just 20 minutes. You need fresh clams, parsley, garlic, chili peppers and spaghetti. Where to eat: seaside restaurants preferably, but you can find it practically everywhere.
- Gnocchetti sardi 🐑. This is a traditional dish from Sardinia. The gnocchetti sardi are a short type of pasta like the pennette. The sauce is a tomato sauce with some pork sausage or sheep meat. Where to eat it: any restaurant in Sardinia.
- Spaghetti cacio e pepe 🧀. Cacio e pepe are typically from Rome and they are made with a sauce made with parmesan and romano cheese grated. Where to eat it: rome and any Roman restaurants in Italy.
- Pasta al pesto 🌱, typically we used short pasta like the pennette or trofie. The pesto is made by hammering basil leafs, EVO oil, parmesan cheese and pine nuts.
- Tagliolini al tartufo nero – Tagliolini pasta with Black Truffle. The tagliolini are similar to the spaghetti, but they are flat. In this recipe they are dressed with black truffle. The tagliolini with black truffle served at Trattoria di Fonte Buona near Florence
Spaghetti alla carbonara
The carbonara sauce seems to have been invented by a young Bolognese chef named Renato Gualandi, who had to improvise a lunch for the American liberating troops. As ingredients, He only had bacon, eggs and cheese. He decided to create a pasta sauce, adding to these ingredients only a little black pepper to best release all the flavors. The appreciation was such that the young Italian chef was hired as an American army chef in Rome. So it was that carbonara pasta sauce became an extremely well-known and widespread dish, right from the city of Rome.
Ingredients of the carbonara
Spaghetti alla carbonara ; Ingredienti. 4 persone porzioni. 350. g spaghetti. 120. g guanciale. 4. tuorli. 30. g pecorino. 20. g grana

Pasta al pesto ligure alla genovese
Pasta al pesto is a tasty vegetarian pasta recipe. The pesto is made with fresh basil, which gives the pesto sauce an incredible flavour. Plus we add grated parmesan cheese and Italian extra-virgin olive oil. This simple recipe is healthy and will make you feel like you are in the cinque terra in Liguria having a lunch on a terrace with the mediterranean sea at your hand.

Pasta alla puttanesca
This is one of my favourite recipes without meat. It’s simple to make but very rich in flavour. The preparation of the sauce takes around 15 minutes. All you need is tomato salsa, onion or garlic for the soffritto*, anchovies, olives, capers, extra-virgin olive oil and Italian pasta, either penne or spaghetti.
Pasta alla puttanesca video recipe
Pasta alla puttanesca video recipe
Pappardelle al ragù
Pappardelle is a type of long pasta. The long pasta like spaghetti is opposite of short pasta like penne and maccheroni. The long pasta has a different name according to how wide it is: the thinnest are the spaghetti, then we have linguine, then tagliatelle and then pappardelle.


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Pici with duck ragù

Try out some of our recipes at home
You can cook some Italian pasta recipes at home, they are quite easy to make. Just follow my recipes and watch the full video.

FAQs
Soffritto is finely chopped onion or garlic shallow fried in extra-virgin olive oil until soft or golden. It’s the base of most Italian recipes, for example ragù, risotto and also minestrone.
Bene!!