Saving the World’s Rarest Pasta
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
4.6 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2025
⏱️ 16 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | What if I told you there was a pasta so special that for more than 300 years, |
| 0:12.6 | pilgrims on the Italian island of Sardinia have trekked 20 miles through the dark just to have a single bowl. |
| 0:25.2 | What if I told you this pasta was so fiendishly complicated to make that it's thwarted celebrity chefs and the world's biggest pasta company. |
| 0:32.8 | For generations, the art of how to make Sue Filendeo, or Threads of God, has been a closely guarded secret. |
| 0:40.5 | Only women in the small city of Noirro were allowed to learn this craft. |
| 0:45.5 | Each mother would teach her daughter how to make these mysterious noodles. |
| 0:49.9 | But as so often happens with things over the generations, the number of women who possess this particular knowledge has dwindled. |
| 0:58.5 | A few years ago, you could count all of them on one hand. |
| 1:02.4 | It looked like the threads of God might vanish forever. |
| 1:07.9 | I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, |
| 1:12.8 | incredible, and wondrous places. Today, the story of the world's rarest and most mysterious pasta, |
| 1:21.4 | what it is, why it is so sought after, and what might save it from extinction after this. |
| 1:36.0 | I'm here today with Diana Hubble. She's a reporter for Atlas Obscura, and she wrote a piece about |
| 1:42.1 | Sufilindeo. Diana, hello. |
| 1:45.4 | Welcome back. |
| 1:46.8 | Hi, happy to be here. |
| 1:48.5 | And talking about my favorite subject, which obviously is noodles. |
| 1:52.7 | Obviously. |
| 1:53.9 | So tell me about these noodles. |
| 1:56.8 | What exactly is Sufilandale? |
| 1:59.3 | So Sufilandayo, which literally translates as Threads of God in Sardo, which is actually closer to Latin than it is to modern day Italian, it's this type of incredibly fine hand-pulled noodle. |
| 2:12.2 | If you've seen Chinese chefs make Langzhou-style la Mien, the process actually looks weirdly similar. The cook needs out a |
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