Within Boccaccio's Decameron, amidst Parmesan, ravioli, and capon broth, pasta ascends into the land of plenty, becoming the very substance of desire.

There exist realms that have never been, and yet, precisely for this reason, they narrate with exquisite accuracy that which humanity most deeply yearned for. Bengodi is one such sanctuary.

Giovanni Boccaccio conjures it in the third novella of the eighth day of the Decameron, as Maso del Saggio sports with the gullible Calandrino, telling him of a remote land where the impossible wears the reassuring guise of comestibles. Vines are bound with sausages, a goose costs but a single penny, and with it, a duckling is bestowed. Then the landscape rises, takes form, and becomes magnificent, edible architecture.

There stands a mountain crafted entirely of "grated Parmesan cheese."

Upon its summit, men are intent on fashioning "maccheroni and raviuoli," boiling them in rich capon broth, and rolling them down the gentle slope. He who gathers the most, possesses the most. Not far off, there flows a stream of Vernaccia, "the finest that was ever drunk," untainted by even a single droplet of water.

It is difficult to find, within the annals of Italian literature, a gastronomic landscape so profoundly physical. One can almost inhale its fragrance: the rich, golden broth of capons, the savory grated cheese, the sweet wine. And behold those maccheroni cascading down a mountain that is neither earth nor stone, but pure sustenance.

The temptation, seven centuries later, is to immediately recognize our contemporary dish of pasta. Yet, that would be far too simplistic.

The fourteenth-century "maccheroni" must not be hastily equated with the shape that bears that name today: in those times, the term possessed a more fluid meaning, denoting diverse preparations, some akin to gnocchi. The "raviuoli," however, trace a more precise lineage: the earliest written record of the word dates back to the opening decades of the fourteenth century, in a Florentine culinary treatise a generation older than the Decameron itself, which already lists them alongside tortelli. Boccaccio, therefore, does not invent this nomenclature; he gathers it from an established gastronomic lexicon, a sign that his audience knew precisely what culinary art was being invoked.

For a jest to succeed, its components must be familiar enough to be artfully distorted and magnified.

Bengodi is absurd because it is boundless, grotesque, not because it is incomprehensible. The reader of the Decameron knows well the nature of cheese, capons, Vernaccia, maccheroni, and ravioli. Boccaccio merely takes real elements and subverts their proportions: cheese is no longer grated sparingly over a dish, it becomes a mountain; wine does not merely fill a chalice, it becomes a river; pasta is not portioned with restraint, but tumbles from on high, belonging to whomsoever can grasp the bounty.

It is here that pasta ceases to be mere nourishment and enters the realm of the imaginary.

In a Middle Ages shadowed by the austere precarity of harvests, by famine, and the specter of hunger, the dream of abundance possessed a visceral reality that we risk losing today. Bengodi overturns the labor required to secure sustenance: there is no sowing, no harvesting, almost no cooking. Food already dwells there. It descends upon man like a grace to ease his tribulations.

And among the elements Boccaccio chooses to give form to this dazzling reverie, there appear maccheroni and ravioli.

We do not know whether the author harbored a personal passion for pasta. The Decameron does not permit us to declare it, and it would be futile to convert a literary testament into a biographical preference. Yet, we know something far more intriguing: within his narrative universe, pasta could already be evoked to represent pleasure, satiety, excess, and the ultimate remedy for the horror vacui.

Calandrino, of course, yearns to believe.

Before a mountain of Parmesan and those maccheroni tumbling down the valley, he does not question whether Bengodi could truly exist.

He only wishes to know how far away it lies.