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50 free Spaghetti trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fifty spaghetti trivia questions for food lovers, pub-quiz setters and anyone who has ever argued about cream in carbonara. The quiz starts in the kitchen (durum wheat, al dente, guanciale, why the Bolognese never serve their ragu on spaghetti) and follows the noodle out into the world: the BBC's spaghetti-tree hoax, Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, the Lady and the Tramp kiss, Spaghetti Junction, spaghetti code, SpaghettiOs, Chef Boyardee and Guns N' Roses' 'The Spaghetti Incident?'. There are questions on the classic dishes too: carbonara, cacio e pepe, puttanesca, aglio e olio, alle vongole, alla chitarra and the charred spaghetti all'assassina of Bari. They start easy and get properly hard, and every question carries a difficulty score. Every answer has been checked against a Wikipedia article or a primary source, and each question links to its page, so you can settle any argument at the table.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'spaghetti' is the plural diminutive of the Italian spago, meaning what?
String
So a single strand is, strictly, a spaghetto: a little string.
Q 02Standard Italian spaghetti is made from water and the semolina of which grain?
Durum
Durum's hardness is what lets dried spaghetti hold its bite when cooked al dente.
Q 03Al-Idrisi recorded the first thin dried pasta being made at Trabia, near which Sicilian city?
Palermo
That 12th-century note is centuries before Marco Polo, whose 'discovery' of pasta in China is a myth.
Q 04Whose 1559 publication is blamed for the myth that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China?
Ramusio
Polo had actually compared a Sumatran sago-flour food to the pastas he already knew from Italy.
Q 05Marco Polo compared Italian pasta to a food the people of Sumatra made from which flour?
Sago
He said he brought samples back to Venice; the story was later garbled into pasta itself coming from the East.
Q 06By 1955, annual spaghetti consumption in Italy had doubled from its pre-war level to how much per person?
28 kg
Before World War II the figure was 14 kg; the post-war boom put a plate on the table most days.
Q 07Spaghettoni is a thicker form of spaghetti; what is the thinner form called?
Spaghettini
Thinner still is capellini, and the very finest is capelli d'angelo, angel hair.
Q 08How has the standard length of dried spaghetti changed since the mid-20th century?
It got shorter
Originally the strands were notably long; shorter lengths won out in the second half of the century because they fit the pot.
Q 09The BBC's 1957 April Fools' film showed spaghetti being harvested from trees in which country?
Switzerland
Panorama placed the harvest in the canton of Ticino, where families were shown plucking strands from the branches.
Q 10Which broadcaster narrated the spaghetti-tree hoax on Panorama?
Richard Dimbleby
His gravitas as the BBC's most trusted voice is why so many viewers believed it.
Q 11What did the BBC tell viewers who rang in asking how to grow their own spaghetti tree?
Put a sprig in a tin of tomato sauce
Hundreds phoned the next day; spaghetti was still exotic enough in 1950s Britain for the joke to land.
Q 12Roughly how many people watched the spaghetti-tree hoax broadcast?
8 million
It aired on 1 April 1957 and is still cited as one of the great television pranks.
Q 13Which 1964 Sergio Leone film kicked off the Spaghetti Western boom?
A Fistful of Dollars
Q 21In which year was the first carbonara recipe published in Italy, in La Cucina Italiana?
1954
One theory ties the name to carbonari, charcoal workers, who supposedly ate it as a hearty meal.
Q 22In Bologna itself, ragu alla bolognese is traditionally served with which pasta?
Tagliatelle
The mayor of Bologna has said flatly that spaghetti bolognese does not exist.
Q 23Which organisation deposited an official Bolognese ragu recipe with Bologna's Chamber of Commerce in 1982?
The Italian Academy of Cuisine
They updated and re-registered it in 2023; milk and wine are in, and the pasta is never spaghetti.
Clint Eastwood's squinting, poncho-wearing Man with No Name became the template for hundreds of imitators.
Q 14Many Spaghetti Westerns were shot in the desert around which Spanish city?
Almeria
The Tabernas Desert doubled for the American Southwest, and its film sets are now tourist attractions.
Q 15Roughly how many European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1978?
Over 600
Nearly 500 of them were Italian, which is why foreign critics coined the pasta nickname.
Q 16Which composer's whistles, twangs and choirs became the sound of the Spaghetti Western?
Ennio Morricone
He and Leone had been classmates at primary school in Rome.
Q 17In Lady and the Tramp, the famous spaghetti kiss happens behind whose restaurant?
Tony's
George Givot voiced Tony and sang 'Bella Notte' over the scene.
Q 18What was Walt Disney's initial reaction to the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp?
He thought it was distasteful
Animator Frank Thomas fought for the sequence, and Walt relented once he saw the finished animation.
Q 19Which cured pork is the traditional choice for spaghetti alla carbonara?
Guanciale
Pancetta is the accepted stand-in; cream is not part of the Roman recipe at all.
Q 20Carbonara is typical of which Italian region?
Lazio
Despite its Roman identity, the first printed recipe appeared in a Chicago cookbook in 1952.
Q 24SpaghettiOs were launched in 1965 under which Campbell's brand?
Franco-American
Marketing manager Donald Goerke, the 'Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs', chose the ring shape as the neat one you could eat with a spoon.
Q 25SpaghettiOs were sold as 'the neat round spaghetti you can eat with a' what?
Spoon
The two-word jingle 'Uh-Oh! SpaghettiOs' did the rest.
Q 26In 2013 SpaghettiOs apologised for a tweet marking which anniversary?
Pearl Harbor
The cheery cartoon O waving a flag was judged wildly out of tune with the occasion.
Q 27Spaghetti squash belongs to which species, along with pumpkins and zucchini?
Cucurbita pepo
Cooked, its flesh pulls away from the rind in strands that stand in for pasta.
Q 28The original 'Spaghetti Junction', opened in 1972, is a motorway interchange in which English city?
Birmingham
Gravelly Hill Interchange stacks its roads on 559 concrete columns at junction 6 of the M6.
Q 29Who coined the nickname 'Spaghetti Junction' in 1965?
A local newspaper journalist
Roy Smith of the Birmingham Evening Mail likened the plans to a plate of spaghetti crossed with a botched Staffordshire knot.
Q 30How many levels does the Gravelly Hill 'Spaghetti Junction' interchange have?
Five
The name has since been borrowed for tangled interchanges from Atlanta to Melbourne.