> As a pretzel authority, then, maybe you can clear something up for me. Are pretzels officialy German in origin?
>
> The story I heard was that pretzels were first baked by Italian monks as treats for their young students (pretziolo (?)= "little rewards" in Italian, so they claimed..) The shape of the pretzel is supposed to resemble the monk's arms folded in prayer.
>
I've looked it up. It's from a 1927 encyclopedia, by the way, so I'm not sure how accurate and complete it is.
It doesn't say anything about the origin of the custom of dipping them in leach before baking them, but it says that there are probably connections to wheel-shaped cake things the Germans (Germanians?) baked in honor of Donar. In 743 A.D., they were prohibited for Christians due to their heathen origin. The encyclopedia says that pretzels probably first started to appear around that time and are indeed supposed arms folded for prayer, hence their name, which is derived from Latin 'bracellum' = 'little arm'.
(The German word 'Brezel' resembles that a bit more)

Fuzzpilz