Are you sure about that? When I visited Italy, it seemed that pretty much all pasta was fresh pasta. You could find it in practically every store. Every restaurant served pasta that was fresh and eggy. I'm skeptical that a technique requiring dry pasta would be so widespread in a country that loves its fresh pasta so very much.

Also, my feeling is that the definition of "al dente" is a little nebulous. I've seen it used to mean "the end result should be slightly chewy", but I've also seen recipes where it means "don't cook the pasta all the way so that it can finish cooking in the sauce pan". I get the feeling that the latter is what's more common in Italy.

(But I could be totally wrong about all this!)

Some people just find al dente to be more pleasant for certain pasta shapes than the soft texture of fresh pasta.

Finishing the pasta in the sauce is always a good idea when it's possible, but you'd still aim for an al dente final texture (e.g. put it into the sauce when it's about a minute away from being al dente).

"Al dente" is the equivalent of rare, there's no ambiguity to it in Italian.

We mainly eat dried pasta; it could be that fresh pasta is overrepresented in restaurants, though.

When I was visiting, I was surprised by how many grocery stores stocked fresh pasta. You could find it almost anywhere. Now that I'm in Dublin, I can't even find a single one!

Going by etymology, I would guess it means the former, as "al dente" comes from "Of the tooth"

> Fresh pasta is not better than dried pasta, just different.

That's true in the trivial sense that "better" is subjective, so nothing is inherently better than anything else.

OTOH, plenty of people do find fresh pasta better than, and not merely different than, dried pasta.

> You can't get an al dente texture with fresh pasta, for example.

Untrue. Al dente texture can be achieved with fresh or dried hard-wheat pasta; you can't get it with soft-wheat pasta, and soft-wheat pasta is easier to work by hand, and is for that reason increasingly popular as fresh pasta -- but you can make fresh hard-wheat pasta, and it used to be more common than it is now among fresh pastas, and you absolutely can make such pasta al dente.

> That's true in the trivial sense that "better" is subjective, so nothing is inherently better than anything else.

That's not at all what I meant. Sometimes dried pasta works better than fresh pasta, and vice versa.

> you absolutely can make such pasta al dente

That's interesting. Does it have advantages over dried pasta?