Everybody knows the improbable history of spaghetti. Marco Polo brought it back to Italy from China, right?

"A total fallacy," insists Luigi Ballerini, a UCLA professor of Italian. "Dry pasta was invented in Sicily by the Arabs in the 12th century. Fresh pasta has been done since Day One. It’s all over the world."

And what about bechamel, that creamy white sauce at the root of so many fancy French dishes?

"Made by the Romans," Ballerini contends.

And French toast?

"Not in the least!" he said. "It goes back to the Italian Renaissance."

Such culinary tidbits are making a rising star of the quick-witted poet who splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.

With contributor status at the snooty food journal Gastronomica, a cooking series on Italian television under his belt and two new cookbooks, the Milan native is rapidly gaining a reputation as one of the world's foremost authorities on the long and colorful culinary history of his homeland.

"Not only does Luigi know Italian food inside and out, he is deeply steeped in Italian culture and history and therefore able to make startling discoveries and offer intriguing speculations about the ways in which various foodstuffs were used and enjoyed in the past," said Darra Goldstein, Gastronomica's editor in chief.

Jeremy Parzen, a New York-based food historian, says Ballerini has only two rivals in Italy and none in the United States.

"He is without a doubt, the most important Italian food historian in America," Parzen said.

Ballerini, who returned 14 years ago to UCLA after a 16-year stint at New York University, maintains he would much rather be known for his eight books of poetry than for pushing 500-year-old recipes of eel torte or kid with garlic -- to cite a few examples from his latest book. But he credits his success to approaching the discipline with the same care as an art historian or scholar in literary studies.

"Food has been a show of social and political power through the ages, so if you follow that trail, you're fleshing out history, particularly the history of social classes," he said.

The formula appears to be a winning one. In 2002 the prominent Italian publishing house Tommasi Editori hired Ballerini to develop a series of books in Italian dedicated to historic gastronomy. For the next and seventh volume of "Cum Grano Salis" (With A Grain of Salt), Ballerini recruited UCLA French professor Jean-Claude Carron to translate and introduce the early 17th-century classic "Le Cuisinier Francois," considered the cornerstone of French cuisine. Past volumes have explored the culinary exploits of Nostradamus, who -- when not forecasting the future -- apparently dabbled in recipes and cosmetics; and Richard II, whose bloodthirstiness apparently was rivaled only by his epicurean instincts.

"In Italy, his Cum Grano Salis series is among the most vibrant new initiatives in historical cookery," Parzen said.

Then Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs enlisted Ballerini and UCLA Italian Department Chairman Massimo Ciavolella to develop a series of English translations of classic Italian texts. The first title, an unabridged English translation of Pellegrino Artusi's 1891 classic, "Scienza in cucina," rolled off the presses in 2003 at University of Toronto Press with an introduction by Ballerini. Sometimes described as "the cookbook that united Italy," the 653-page behemoth is recognized as the first Italian cookbook -- in the sense it was the first to put under one cover recipes from all regions of the newly unified country. Unabashedly patriotic in tone, "Artusi" -- as Italian homemakers call it to this day -- reclaims Italian cooking traditions that had long been assumed to be French. It also is credited with helping Italy forge a national identity in the first two decades following unification.

"Along with the classic children's story 'Pinocchio,' Artusi conveyed melting pot messages at a time when the country was struggling with embracing people of different regions and different dialects," Ballerini said.

Last month the University of California Press released yet another historical cookbook edited by Ballerini. "The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book" presents 50 recipes written in the late 15th century by Maestro Martino, who has been called the first celebrity chef. The private chef of a prominent cardinal and gourmet, Martino is remembered for his mastery of sumptuous, convivial dinners for small groups of people at a time when the prevailing custom was showy banquets.

"This is the first evidence we have of the dinner party," Ballerini said.

So useful was Martino's "De arte coquinaria" (The Art of Cooking) perceived to be that the 15th-century Italian humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi, better known as Platina, promptly appropriated it, translating the cookbook from vernacular Italian into Latin and making copies with a newfangled invention: the printing press.

"By 'lifting' Maestro Martino's recipes and translating them into Latin, Platina ensured that the highly original approach of De arte coquinaria would not remain confined to a few obscure manuscripts penned in the vernacular, but on the contrary would be disseminated through Renaissance Europe in the first cookbook deemed worthy of mechanical reproduction," Ballerini writes.

Additionally, Martino is credited with inventing "battuto," a basic building block for savory dishes that consists of sauteed onion, carrot and celery. Ballerini contends Martino developed the combination as a means of coping with the spice shortage that vexed Europe after the Spice Route fell to Ottoman control in 1453.

"It's a good thing his recipe didn't get picked up more widely because Europe might not have felt the need to look for a back door to the Spice Route, and Christopher Columbus wouldn't have had reason to discover America," Ballerini said.

Not bad for a man who claims to come from "a family with no culinary tradition."

"My mother was a working woman," Ballerini recalled. "So we ate every night at the local trattoria."

His break came in 1997, after managing a struggling New York-based publishing house devoted to English translations of European classics. To cover advertising for one of the imprint's final books, Ballerini agreed to write a column for the venerable cooking periodical, La Cucina Italiana.

One year later, the title -- an early translation of Artusi -- still wasn't moving, but he was hooked: What did Rossini eat? Or Casanova? Or Leonardo da Vinci? These are the kinds of mysteries that still keep Ballerini's juices flowing. "A tavola con la storia" (Dining With History), a 12-part mini-series on Italian gastronomic history, followed on Italy's Gambero Rosso Food Channel.

Someone who insists he can't cook anything but eggs -- a skill developed while a "pearl-diver" at a London breakfast house as a college student in the late 1950s -- Ballerini nonetheless manages to pull out the stops for his book launches. In 2003 he enlisted celebrity chef Mauro Maffrici from the tony New York restaurant Trulli to demonstrate the wonders of Artusi. Sal Marino, the chef at Santa Monica's Il Grano, followed suit in the spring. Marino tackled classic Martino concoctions with a special prix fixe dinner on Feb. 22. UCLA's Book Zone is planning a smaller scale signing/dining for March 10 at noon.

Can't make either? Non c'è problema. Ballerini and Marino are already discussing the roll-out for his next book. Projected for 2006, Messisbugo's "Banquets, compositions of victuals, etc." will detail 10 banquets thrown by the Este family in the north Italian city of Ferrara, which was famous for the brilliance of its court life during the Renaissance.

Buon appetito!