Spaghetti Trivia
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49 free Spaghetti trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 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 49 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 is Latin for 'hard', and the name fits: it is the hardest of all wheats, milled into coarse semolina instead of fine flour.
Q 03In 1154 the geographer al-Idrisi described dried pasta strands being made at Trabia, near which Sicilian city?
Palermo
Palermo's neighbour Trabia was already exporting shiploads of dried pasta in 1154, a century before Marco Polo was born, so he can't have brought it home from China.
Q 04Astronomers use 'spaghettification' for the stretching of anything that falls into what?
A black hole
A black hole pulls far harder on your feet than on your head if you fall in feet first, so you'd be squeezed and drawn out long and thin, like a noodle.
Q 05What turns spaghetti al nero di seppia jet black?
Cuttlefish ink
Cuttlefish ink, common in Venetian cooking, colours and flavours the sauce; the same ink gave painters the brown pigment sepia, which is simply the Latin word for cuttlefish.
Q 06Which rapper opened a Detroit restaurant called Mom's Spaghetti, named after one of his own lyrics?
Eminem
Eminem took the name from a line in his 2002 hit 'Lose Yourself'; after years of pop-ups the walk-up window opened in 2021, and he served the first customers himself.
Q 07Which name is given to a thinner form of spaghetti?
Spaghettini
Spaghettini adds the Italian diminutive -ini to spaghetti, while spaghettoni takes the augmentative -oni for a thicker strand; thinner still than spaghettini is capellini.
Q 08Which Nobel laureate famously spent an evening snapping dry spaghetti to learn why it rarely breaks in two?
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman never solved it; French researchers showed in 2005 that the first snap sends a wave down the strand that breaks it again, and an MIT team later found that twisting it first gives two clean halves.
Q 09The BBC's 1957 April Fools' film showed spaghetti being harvested from trees in which country?
Switzerland
Switzerland's Ticino canton was the setting, and the joke worked because the narrator was Richard Dimbleby, one of the BBC's most respected broadcasters.
Q 10What did the BBC tell viewers asking how to grow a spaghetti tree?
Put a sprig in a tin of tomato sauce
Put a sprig in a tin of tomato sauce 'and hope for the best' was the BBC's reply to hundreds of callers; tinned spaghetti was about all most 1950s Britons knew of pasta.
Q 11Followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster have worn what on their heads in official driving-licence photos?
A colander
A colander got through in Austria in 2011: Niko Alm called it religious headgear, though police said they passed the photo only because his whole face was visible.
Q 12Which 1964 Sergio Leone film kicked off the Spaghetti Western boom?
A Fistful of Dollars
A Fistful of Dollars copied Kurosawa's Yojimbo so closely that the Japanese studio sued, and the case was reportedly settled for 15 percent of the film's takings.
Q 13Many Spaghetti Westerns were shot in the desert around which Spanish city?
Almeria
Q 21In Bologna itself, ragu alla bolognese is traditionally served with which pasta?
Tagliatelle
Tagliatelle, a flat fresh ribbon, is the city's pairing; in 2019 Bologna's mayor called spaghetti bolognese 'fake news' and asked people to send him photos of it from abroad.
Q 22Which organisation deposited an official Bolognese ragu recipe with Bologna's Chamber of Commerce in 1982?
The Italian Academy of Cuisine
The Italian Academy of Cuisine set a study committee to work on the recipe again and, in April 2023, lodged an updated version with the same chamber by notarial act.
Q 23SpaghettiOs were launched in 1965 under which Campbell's brand?
Franco-American
Almeria's Tabernas Desert doubled for the American Southwest, and sets built for the films survived as Wild West theme parks that went on hosting shoots.
Q 14In Japan, Spaghetti Westerns are better known by the name of which other pasta?
Macaroni
Macaroni Westerns is the Japanese label; film critic Nagaharu Yodogawa is said to have swapped the pasta because spaghetti sounded too thin and feeble.
Q 15Which composer's whistles, twangs and choirs became the sound of the Spaghetti Western?
Ennio Morricone
Ennio Morricone had shared a primary-school class with Leone for a year; he wrote some of the music before filming, and Leone stretched scenes so it wouldn't have to end.
Q 16In Lady and the Tramp, the famous spaghetti kiss happens behind whose restaurant?
Tony's
Tony's owner serenades the two dogs himself with 'Bella Notte' while they share a plate of spaghetti by moonlight.
Q 17What was Walt Disney's initial reaction to the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp?
He thought it was distasteful
He thought it was distasteful, animator Frank Thomas recalled, so the scene was dropped; Thomas animated it anyway from a discarded story reel, and the result won Walt over.
Q 18Which cured pork is the traditional choice for spaghetti alla carbonara?
Guanciale
Guanciale, cured pork jowl, is a late arrival: Italy's first printed carbonara recipe, in 1954, called for pancetta, and jowl only took over in the following decades.
Q 19Carbonara is typical of which Italian region?
Lazio
Lazio's capital Rome claims the dish, but its origin is disputed: one theory credits charcoal burners, another the bacon and eggs American soldiers brought to Rome in 1944.
Q 20Carbonara's oldest known printed recipe appeared in 1952 in a restaurant guide to which Midwestern city?
Chicago
Chicago's Near North Side guide Vittles and Vice printed it two years before La Cucina Italiana ran Italy's first recipe, which used Gruyère and garlic.
Franco-American's Donald Goerke, the 'Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs', rejected cowboys, spacemen and stars for a plain ring because it held its shape through canning and reheating.
Q 24SpaghettiOs were sold as 'the neat round spaghetti you can eat with a' what?
Spoon
Spoon-sized rings were the whole idea: Campbell's wanted a canned pasta that small children could eat without mess, and the jingle 'Uh-Oh! SpaghettiOs' did the rest.
Q 25In 2013 SpaghettiOs apologised for a tweet marking which anniversary?
Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor's 72nd anniversary drew a cheery tweet from the brand; after parodies piled up, SpaghettiOs deleted it and apologised.
Q 26Spaghetti squash belongs to the same species as which summer vegetable?
Zucchini
Zucchini is picked young and soft while spaghetti squash ripens hard, yet both are Cucurbita pepo, the species that also gives us field pumpkins.
Q 27The original 'Spaghetti Junction', opened in 1972, is a motorway interchange in which English city?
Birmingham
Birmingham's interchange had to clear two railways, three canals and two rivers, and its pillars were spaced so that horse-drawn narrowboats could still pass underneath.
Q 28Who coined the nickname 'Spaghetti Junction' in 1965?
A local newspaper journalist
A local newspaper journalist, Roy Smith of the Evening Mail, likened the plans to a plate of spaghetti crossed with a botched Staffordshire knot, and his sub-editor made it the headline.
Q 29A tangle of Interstates 85 and 285 nicknamed 'Spaghetti Junction' lies just outside which city?
Atlanta
Atlanta's Tom Moreland Interchange was finished in 1987, replacing a cloverleaf so clogged that it had earned the nickname Malfunction Junction.
Q 30Programmers' 'spaghetti code' is most associated with over-use of which statement?
GOTO
GOTO jumps make a program's flow hard to follow; in his 1968 letter 'Go To Statement Considered Harmful', Edsger Dijkstra argued that it should be abolished from all higher-level languages.