There seems to be molto confusion around the origins of fettuccine Alfredo. Ask any true Roman about it and you'll be met with a befuddled "who is-a Alfredo?" That's because, fellow Americans, Roman children didn't grow up scarfing down plates of this creamy comfort food like we did here. (Then again, Olive Garden has yet to hit Mediterranean shores.) Alfredo, after all, isn't found alongside carbonara and amatriciana in the pantheon of celebrated local dishes—not because it isn't Roman, but because it never spread throughout the city. Its origins lay in a single, no-name trattoria on a side street near the Trevi Fountain. In the early 1900s, the eponymous Alfredo di Lielo needed a calorific meal to feed his pregnant wife. So he combined butter and cheese and melted it over fettuccine noodles. Sated, his wife insisted he add it to his menu.
But it remained a strictly of-the-house specialty. Despite the acclaim (rumors swirl that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks ate it on their Roman holiday in 1927), other trattorias likely rejected it due to inauthenticity. Alfredo used parmigiano for the cheese (a bold move in Pecorino Romano country) and butter, which was pretty much as foreign an ingredient to Italians at the time as milk was to the Japanese. But it did take off stateside thanks to a Pennsylvania noodle company: Pennsylvania Dutch marketed a creamy sauce called Alfredo after influential New York restaurateur George Renart raved about the dish in the Saturday Evening Post when he returned from a trip to Rome. The version we eat now—loaded with cream, often with chicken—is a bastardization of what Alfredo cooked up a century ago. And it's definitely not what you would find in Rome now, even if those trattorias from Testaccio to Prati had Alfredo on the menu (which they don't).
Should we just quit the search and make do with carbonara instead? Local food expert Elizabeth Minchilli says no way. “I always encourage travelers to seek out Alfredo in Rome,” she says. “You just need to know where to go.” That would be Trattoria della Scrofa, between Piazza Navona and the Trevi Fountain, a 103-year-old restaurant that Alfredo started after his first spot was flattened to make space for a shopping center. What you’ll get is a heaping plate of pasta prepped as Alfredo did it all those years ago: hot noodles, on a hot plate, mixed with (lots of) softened butter and (lots of) grated parmigiano right at your table. What you won’t get is cream, garlic, or an overwhelming crush of travelers. Which, in Rome, is rewarding in its own right.
This article was originally published in 2014; it has been updated with new information.