Wasnt pasta invented in China?
Thanks for the interesting question, which I'll happily answer with an uncalled-for, obnoxious off-topic essay.
Making some pasta is a straightforward idea that surfaces the very moment you have fire, cookware, and flour.
Just mix flour, water, and optionally a proteic binder like eggs, into a unleavened dough that's then portioned into whatever bite-sized shape or clump to be boiled or steamed. Even a troglodite can come up with that and oh! that's yummy!
Noodles, maccheroni, lasagna, dumplings, gnocchi, spätzle, cous cous... it's all the same stuff, and it's deeply rooted in many traditional dishes everywhere.
So, if it's true that agriculture was first developed in the fertile crescent, then pasta most probably first appeared somewhere around there and was then exported or reinvented anywhere agriculture was exported or reinvented.
China has remarkably ancient archaeological proofs of existence of proper miàn noodles, just as ancient Greek literature has mentions of their own ("itria"), just as a passage in the Talmud debates whether unleavened dough is still kosher if boiled...
Dried pasta was probably a Mediterranean or middle-eastern development as it requires durum (hard wheat) which is endemic in the sub-saharian region but wasn't available in east Asia.
So, what the italians have done exactly? Well, for whatever reason, they simply developed an obsession for pasta during modern cuisine era (that is, after the influx of new ingredients from the Americas), and so, alongside a lot of new recipes with fresh homemade pasta, they perfectioned dry pasta manufacturing with the "trafilatura al bronzo" (extrusion with bronze tooling) method.
Creating this sturdy dry pasta with virtually infinite shelf life which comes in so many cute shapes, stays "al dente" in the core, and loves to bind its rough surface to the sauce (the latter feature is a bit lost with very smooth contemporary industrial pasta extruded with teflon, but I digress).
So, well, definitely italians didn't invent pasta, they simply put lots of love into some specific variants of it.
We did invent the four-pronged fork to eat spaghetti though - that, we did.