Carbonara (Italian: [karboˈnaːra]) is a pasta dish made with fatty cured pork, hard cheese, eggs, salt, and black pepper.

While guanciale, a cured pork jowl, is traditional, some variations use pancetta,[6][5] and lardons of smoked bacon are a common substitute outside Italy.

It is very similar to pasta cacio e uova, a dish dressed with melted lard and a mixture of eggs and cheese, but not meat or pepper.

Cacio e uova is documented as far back as 1839 and, according to researchers, anecdotal evidence indicates that some Italians born before World War II associate that name with the dish now known as "carbonara".

[8] The 1931 edition of the Guide of Italy of the TCI describes a pasta (strascinati) dish from Cascia and Monteleone di Spoleto, in Umbria, whose sauce contains whipped eggs, sausage, and pork fat and lean, which could be considered as a precursor of carbonara, although it does not contain any cheese.

[14] The name carbonara first appears in print in 1950, when the Italian newspaper La Stampa described it as a Roman dish sought out by American officers after the Allied liberation of Rome in 1944.

[18][19] Cesari adds that the dish is mentioned in an Italian movie from 1951,[20] while the first attested recipe is in an illustrated cookbook[21] published in Chicago in 1952 by Patricia Bronté.

[22] The controversial Italian academic and professor Alberto Grandi also said that carbonara's first attested recipe is American, citing Cesari, a claim that has been criticized in Italy.

A variant is pasta alla carbonara di mare, a seafood dish widespread in Lazio, Tuscany, particularly in Viareggio, and on the Riviera Romagnola.