Today on Food on Fridays I’m re-running  a post I wrote on my old blog a few years ago, when Chris and lived in Bolzano. It’s a great story, and as it’s appropriate to this time of the year,  I thought it well worth another mention.

So below you will find the text from my 2011 22bz blog post explaining all about “The Fatal Lure of Lasagna. ” Enjoy.

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As a lasagna fan myself, I was drawn to a story I read on the internet, and I certainly hope it’s a true one (it is as far as I can tell, at least). You may actually have already heard about this, since I jotted down a note about it a couple of months ago, but hadn’t had a chance to blog about it until now.

Here’s an excerpt from the original article about a hapless drug-dealer with a love of lasagna that proved his undoing. [LLM 2015 update:  the article is no longer available on the internet, but I found another article on this site about it instead. I’ve left the quote from the original article below.]

After being given a 3-year, 8-month sentence for trafficking cocaine in 2000, Giancarlo Sabatini went into hiding, according to the Associated Press.  …  Many Italians prepare a meat lasagna the day before Ash Wednesday to kick off the Lenten season of fasting, and it was this dish that police saw Sabatini’s daughter skittishly carrying home on Fat Tuesday.  Police spied the suspicious pasta delivery, correctly guessed that Sabatini was inside awaiting a feast and arrested him yesterday.

In other words, Sabatini, the drug-dealer, eluded the police for 11 years, and then came out of hiding just to get a taste of his wife’s lasagna again. Talk about having a food craving – that is pretty extreme.

Consider, too, that the police actually knew how much Sabatini loved his wife’s lasagna, and so they decided to stake out his daughter’s house, on the alert for suspicious pans of lasagna made by the her mother, coming into her house.

Truly, what’s not to love about a story like this.