Which is relatively easy to find in the US. So the difference must lie elsewhere.
I think the difference may be in the age. Even dried pasta is better when its hasnt been sitting in a stock house for months.
Most supermarkets sell fresh pasta today. I think it’s more like the pasta in Italy, though it’s been awhile since I’ve been to Italy.
Unfortunately, I have to do a 
on this one. When I was a kid, an Italian restaurant and bar named Dante’s was three blocks from my home, and since “al dente” was always pronounced with an “ah” sound in our area (apparently on the theory that it was a more “continental” pronunciation), I assumed that “al dente” was “the way they prepare it at Dante’s” :o
Someone was questioning about cooking the pasta with the lid off. Now I come from good NY Italian stock. It never even crossed my mind that you would put the lid on. I saw and learned from the earliest age that you cook all pasta with the lid off.
For a real treat, purchase some better frozen pasta and cook Al Dente. So much more taste and texture.
For a true treat find a friend that will make homemade pasta.
I usually just buy a dry pasta, but I use to carefully cook up my own sauce from scratch and cook it at least 3 hours. I would try to have various leftover meats to add to the sauce for flavoring.
Remember the great secret to a good tasting sauce is to brown off the garlic first.
Absolutely correct. It only takes a bit of experimentation to conclude that certain brands – or even certain batches of certain brands – of dried pasta are more suitable for certain applications than others. I’d take Wegman’s brand dried spaghetti over Barilla, and find only slight differences between this brand and De Cecco, which I prefer. There are lots of brands of pasta, and places where dried pasta is created, and manufacturing techniques such as the use of brass dies which will make your experimentation as rich as you wish to take it. The results of your tastings can vary according to preference and technique, which I find is the single most important factor in preparing your pasta (provided that the pasta is not of the sort which is either crunchy or mushy, and nowhere in between, i.e., cheap in most cases). Quantity of water used to boil pasta can have a profound effect on the texture of the cooked pasta, as can the method by which you sauce the pasta. It’s possible to remove pasta when it’s significantly undercooked, for example, and by frying the pasta in fat or sauce, reach a consistently perfect al dente – in fact you have a better chance of reaching al dente with poor quality dried pasta using this method then by leaving it in the water until “done.” I produce consistently al dente pasta at my US home kitchen, using products available at any supermarket – there’s absolutely no truth to the claim that dried pasta purchased in the US is inferior in any way to anything cooked up in Italy, provided one knows how to cook pasta and how to shop for the pasta in the first place. It’s true that nominally “dry” products like beans or pasta absorb or expell moisture depending on environment, storage, time stored, but I’ve no reason to believe Italian products are stored for less time than US-made products (like US-sold Barilla) before consumption, especially given the importance of the pantry in many Italian households.
Fresh pasta is an entirely different ingredient, is not used in the same way as dried pasta, and is not therefore a more “authentic” substitution for dried pasta in many dishes. However, if you’ve never made certain kinds of pasta al forno using fresh lasagne, you’re really missing out on what can be a rather sophisticated and crowd-pleasing dish. Try it sometime.
On the one hand, there are quite a few incompetent “teachers” of cooking out there, and not just on the “food” channels, and among the competent, there are many who invent bits of lore or distort correct techniques for various purposes. On the other hand, “al dente” can just as well refer to the cooking of vegetables, for example, as to the cooking of grains. To say that “al dente” is a form of Italian cooking, in general, however, is analogous to saying that “medium rare” is a form of French cooking – perhaps the host wished us to believe that a certain toothsome quality is desirable in any pan-Italian dish, which makes sense grammatically, but is probably false as a matter of record.
Note: “Toothsome” is used as a pun upon “al dente,” and isn’t meant to mean “delicious,” in this context. There are lots of Italian foods which are toothsome, but only a very few can be called “al dente.” Exceptions to the law of al dente might be apricots, soups, many desserts, many breads, etc. To call underripe fruit or crusty bread al dente seems an abnormal act.
And, of course, if you burn it by letting the pot boil dry, that’s “al dante”. The initial relaization and the billowing smoke is Hell, the cleaning-up is Purgatory, and the clean kitchen afterwards is Heaven. 