Marika divides the types of pasta into different categories and explains their characteristics, ranging from ingredients to shelf life, to cooking time, and consistency.

There are different kinds of flour used to make pasta. "Flour" is a generic term but it's not always accurate. Marika explains it all.

There is an amazing variety of fresh and dried pasta shapes and sizes in Italy, referred to as formati (shapes and sizes). Their names have to do with their surface (smooth, rough, grooved), their size, expressed with a suffix, such as -one, -etto, -ino, etc, and/or what they resemble. Marika makes some sense of the vast assortment of pasta found in Italian supermarkets.