By Frank W. Santucci, La Nostra Voce 

Growing up in Verona, Penn., proved to be one of the best chapters of my life. We lived on the Verona hilltop, surrounded by an Italian neighborhood that underpinned my formative years.

My mother, Elisabetta Vescio, was born in Gizzeria, Calabria; and my father, Guglielmo Santucci, hailed from the mountainous area of Abruzzi. They fell in love and were married in 1934 in the States.  As a boy, I was not aware that each region in Italy had its own unique menus.

Whatever my Mom cooked I ate and loved it, even if the food had bizarre names. One day she prepared a different type of pasta: extra-large noodles thicker than a finger. I approved, especially after dunking the magical carbohydrates in mom’s homemade sauce. She called it “strangolapreti.”  She never offered the meaning, and at the time, I was more interested in eating versus asking questions. If I recall correctly, I only dined on this pasta perhaps twice as I was growing up.

This article first appeared in La Nostra Voce, ISDA’s monthly newspaper that chronicles Italian American news, history, culture and traditions. Subscribe today.

Years later, enter Stanley Tucci. In 2022, the “Searching for Italy” host visited the town of Rimini in the Emilia-Romagna region, and suddenly I saw it: “strangolapreti” or “strozzapreti,” which literally translates to “priest strangler” or “priest choker.”

I was astounded; I hadn’t heard any mention of this pasta since my childhood, and I had to start researching how this elongated form of cavatelli, or hand-rolled pasta, received such dark and ominous nicknames.

Here are some possible explanations:

One is that gluttonous priests were so enthralled by the savory pasta that they ate too quickly and choked themselves. Another explanation involves the “azdora” (“housewife” in the Romagna dialect), who “choked” the dough strips to make the strozzapreti. The azdora would express rage (perhaps triggered by the misery and difficulties of her life) and curse the local clergy, resulting in a pasta that could choke a priest. A third states that wives would customarily make the pasta for churchmen as partial payment for land rents (in Romagna, the Catholic Church had extensive land properties rented to farmers), and their husbands would be angered enough by the priests devouring their wives’ food to wish the priests would choke as they stuffed their mouths with it. The name surely reflects the anticlericalism of the people of Romagna and Tuscany, according to Wikipedia.com.

Another possible explanation is that following Sunday mass, it was common for the priest to visit homes of the villagers and enjoy dinner with them. The more pleasant experiences for the priest would entice them to come back to that home more frequently. Yet another origin story is that the pasta resembles a clerical collar, commonly referred to as a “priest choker.”

This history preceded the unification of the independent states of the Italian peninsula.

Ah, how times have changed.