What follows is a gallery of culinary horrors: pasta dishes gone horribly wrong. They may look good, even tasty to you, but believe me, no true Italian would ever prepare, or even eat, a dish of pasta like the ones you are going to see. Cooking pasta is quite simple. We already gave you the step by step guide to cooking true Italian pasta.

The basic caveat and most common error is this: you do not cook pasta, serve it and then pour sauce over it. No. You don’t. What you want to do is mixing and stirring pasta and sauce together while they cook. This is not only a matter of taste – cooking pasta and sauce at the same time make the pasta absorb both sauce and flavor – but also of practicality: if you put the sauce on top of pasta and don’t eat quickly, pasta will become an inedible glue. Not to mention the fact that your spaghetti will look raw and uncooked. Ok, let’s begin!