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The Atlas Obscura Podcast

Saving the World’s Rarest Pasta

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.61.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For 300 years, only a handful of women in Sardinia knew how to make the “threads of God,” an exceptionally intricate pasta. But then, one woman decided to share the recipe with the outside world.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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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