Spaghetti all'assassina originated in Bari, the capital of Apulia in southern Italy.
Unlike most spaghetti dishes, all'assassina is cooked directly in a pan rather than boiled separately and finished with sauce. The raw or partly prepared spaghetti is gradually moistened with a tomato broth while it cooks, much like risotto. Direct contact with the pan allows the strands to brown and develop a deliberately crisp, almost charred surface.
The dish is generally traced to Bari in the late 1960s. One widely cited account places its creation in 1967 at the restaurant Al Sorso Preferito, where Foggian chef Enzo Francavilla prepared it for diners. Its fiery flavor supposedly inspired the joking description assassino, or “murderer,” which became part of the dish’s name.
Some accounts associate the recipe with another Bari restaurant, so the precise origin story is not entirely uncontested. The city itself, however, is the canonical answer. Its popularity revived after declining in the 1980s, helped by the Accademia dell’Assassina, founded in Bari in 2013, and later popular-culture appearances.