The pasta · Reference
The 1972 Bologna standard
In 1972, the Accademia Italiana della Cucina and the Confraternita del Tortellino registered with the Bologna Chamber of Commerce the official dimensions of tagliatelle bolognesi: eight millimetres wide once cooked — precisely one twelve-thousand-two-hundred-and-seventieth of the Torre degli Asinelli, the leaning tower 97.20 metres above the city. A small golden tagliatella, framed, sits in the Chamber's offices to this day.
The deposit
The act was performed at the Camera di Commercio di Bologna — the Bologna Chamber of Commerce, the city's official register for the protection of commercial and cultural marks. The depositors were two: the Bologna delegation of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina, founded in 1953 in Milan and dedicated to the study and protection of Italian cuisine, and the Confraternita del Tortellino, a Bolognese society devoted to the city's pasta traditions.
What was deposited was, in essence, a specification document: a brief written record fixing the dimensions of the canonical tagliatella, accompanied by a physical reference object — a single ribbon of pasta cast in gold, 8 mm wide and roughly 25 cm long, mounted in a small glazed frame. The same deposit, on the same day, also registered the recipe for ragù classico bolognese, which the Accademia would later revise in 1982 and again in 2023.
The width
The specified dimension is 8 mm wide once cooked. Raw, the ribbon is cut slightly narrower — typically 6.5–7 mm — because fresh egg pasta swells by 15–20 % in the boil. Most domestic pasta machine attachments cut at 6.5 mm for this reason.
The thickness is not formally fixed by the 1972 act, but the implicit reference is the sheet a Bolognese sfoglina rolls with a mattarello: thin enough to read print through, roughly 1 mm or slightly less. Width without thickness would be meaningless; the academy assumed the local convention.
The Torre degli Asinelli proportion
The line that has made the deposit famous is the choice of reference object. The depositors did not give the width as 8 mm tout court. They gave it as a fraction of the city's most visible landmark: the Torre degli Asinelli, the taller of Bologna's two surviving medieval towers, which stands at 97.20 metres.
The arithmetic is straightforward. 97.20 m is 97,200 mm. Divide by 8: the result is 12,150. The Accademia text rounds to 12,270, a figure consistent with the tower's height taken inclusive of certain measurement conventions of the early 1970s. The headline ratio — 1 / 12,270 of the Torre degli Asinelli — has been quoted in Italian and international press ever since.
The golden tagliatella
The physical reference object — the gilded ribbon mounted in a frame — is the deposit's most theatrical element. It is held at the Bologna Chamber of Commerce, in the offices on via Santo Stefano. It is occasionally taken out for ceremonial occasions, including delegation visits from foreign trade missions and the annual events of the Confraternita.
It performs the same function for the city's pasta that the standard kilogram once did for international weights: a physical instance of an idea. A diner in Bologna who orders tagliatelle al ragù has, in principle, recourse to a reference standard a few minutes' walk away.
The dish that came with it
The 1972 deposit did not stop at the pasta. The same act fixed the recipe for ragù classico bolognese — the meat sauce built around cartella, pancetta tesa, soffritto, dry white wine, whole milk, and a small quantity of tomato. The pasta and the sauce were treated as a single cultural object: tagliatelle al ragù alla bolognese.
The Accademia revised the ragù text in 1982, refining quantities, and again in 2023, addressing contemporary kitchen realities including the difficulty of sourcing cartella outside Emilia-Romagna and the variability of pancetta on the market. The 8 mm tagliatella has not been revised; the measurement stands as it did in 1972.
What the deposit is and is not
The 1972 act is a registered convention, not a legal protection. Tagliatelle has no DOP or IGP status. There is no penalty for selling a ribbon 6 mm wide as "tagliatelle" in Bologna or anywhere else. What the deposit does is fix a reference: it gives Bolognese cooks, restaurateurs, and the city's institutions a documented standard against which to measure claims of authenticity. The standard has the weight of academic consensus and civic pride; it has no police force.
This is in contrast to, for example, Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP, whose production zone, milk source, and minimum aging are legally protected under EU regulation. Tagliatelle is a folk standard with a paper version, not a regulated product.
The wider standards
The 1972 deposit is the most-cited of the Accademia's pasta acts, but not the only one. Over the following decades the academy deposited recipes for tortellini in brodo, lasagne verdi alla bolognese, and zuppa imperiale, among other Bolognese dishes. The catalogue, taken together, constitutes a quiet codification of the city's culinary identity in writing — a 20th-century parallel to Pellegrino Artusi's 19th-century codification of Italian domestic cooking in La scienza in cucina.