Spaghetti: Italy's most iconic dish you eat with a fork.
Yes really, only with a fork. You leave out the spoon. You still sometimes see people twisting the spaghetti strands in the spoon. Or, much worse, that one cuts the spaghetti with a knife! Both ways are out of the question, but especially the latter. Spaghetti is eaten 'solo' with a fork.

How do you eat pasta according to etiquette?
In Italy, spaghetti or other pasta dishes are a primo piatto: an appetiser or the first course.

There is usually a large dinner plate (for the secondo, the second course) in front of you, topped with a soup or pasta plate. This is always a plate with a high rim.

How to proceed. Keep your wrists steady on the edge of the table. You take the fork in the hand you normally eat with, as if it were a spoon. Put the fork upright, slightly at the edge of the portion of spaghetti. Let the fork do the heavy lifting. Turn the long pasta against the edge of the plate into a bite-sized nest. Your other hand does not participate, it has free rein. And yes, slurping is allowed!

And what if I have sauce left over?
You leave the spoon for that too.

You will be served bread at the beginning of dinner according to Italian custom: la scarpetta. Translated: the shoe.

This la scarpetta use for the final tribute to your pasta: fare la scarpetta. Which freely translated means 'doing the shoe'. So stay away from that bread at the beginning of the meal. Restrain yourself! Do not, like the Dutch, fly straight to the bread basket as if one has not eaten for an eternity. Panickedly searching for a lump of butter you can't find. Then oil, if there is any.

No, you keep la scarpetta (the bread) for last. When the pasta plate is empty, tear off a piece of bread and use la scarpetta like a shoe, as if you were wiping the floor with it. The floor of your emptied plate!

A final farewell to your perfect pasta: fare la scarpetta. This is not at all an inappropriate custom. The waiter considers it a great compliment, not to mention the dishwasher.