On Christmas Eve, 1952, Remo, the Rome Zoo’s two-year-old elephant suddenly died of a heart attack.

Remo was known to eat spaghetti — as much as 10lbs of pasta at a time. For the six months leading up to his death, he refused to eat like an ordinary elephant eschewing hay. The pasta had ben offered to him by zookeepers as a reward for his good behavior around all the zoo’s visitors.

The attendants would serve Remo a variety of pasta dishes including Al Burro e Parmigiano, a pasta dish similar to the original Fettuccine Alfredo. However, his favorite was spaghetti al Amatriciana.

Several variations on Amatriciana exist, but the main ingredients are salt cured pork, pepper, and tomatoes. In Amatrice, one of the Italian towns claiming to have created the dish, the salted pork includes guanciale, a cut of pork from the jowl but does not include garlic.

In Rome, the pasta is almost always bucatini, although cooks are less strict about this in Amatrice, or apparently the zoo where Remo was fed spaghetti.

The one ingredient everyone agrees is incorrect is bacon, although this is far more common in American versions of Amatriciana, especially when guanciale is hard to find.

As for Remo, he was known to twist spaghetti with his trunk, and according to newspaper accounts, ate so delicately he didn’t even splatter sauce.

As it happens, however, elephants cannot eat a little pasta as a treat. Remo’s pasta addiction likely contributed to his intestinal infection, and that infection led to his heart attack.

Still a juvenile, Remo weighed only about 2,000lbs, considerably less than his parents who weighed in at 8,000lbs, but the zoo still required a crane to lift the body.

The story of Remo’s death circulated throughout the United States in December of 1952 on the wire services. Many of the newspapers carrying the story served markets with few Italians, and its likely for many readers, this was the first time they had ever heard of Amatriciana.

Read all about this and other historic sauces in Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American.