Three American exchange students in Italy ended up wishing they had stuck to pot noodles, after they tried to cook pasta without water and ended up setting their house on fire. 

The three young women were reportedly keen to try and cook their own authentic Italian meal at home, but had no idea how to prepare the pasta and threw it into a dry pan. 

Firefighters in Florence managed to put out the flames before they had spread beyond the kitchen.

The embarrassing episode ended on a happy note for the exchange students: after hearing the story, a top chef in the city offered the three students a four-hour cooking class with two of his restaurant's chefs. 

"It's all too easy to just laugh about it," he told La Nazione. "I feel we failed, as a city, to properly teach these young women who wanted to cook our traditional dish. It's food for thought."

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