Italy’s city that revolutionised pasta
AS a sea breeze blew in from the Gulf of Naples, small, gold-coloured dust-devils slowly sprouted along the factory rooftop, spiralling their way east toward Mount Vesuvius with the precision of ballerinas pirouetting across a stage floor.
In Gragnano, a town of 29 000 inhabitants located 30km south-east of Naples in Italy’s Campania region, the wind strikes like a bell toll, rhythmically throughout the day. Residents initially thought the breeze was “Le Mistral”, a cool, dry wind that blows through Provence into the Mediterranean. They were half right. While the northwesterly wind goes by the same name — and is just as defining a feature in southern Italy as southern France — this Mistral (or Marino, as locals call it) blows the opposite way, bringing humidity and minerals from the sea into the streets of Gragnano.
“You could produce and dry pasta every day because of the predictability of this wind blowing inside the village into the valley,” said Giuseppe Di Martino, CEO and third-generation pastaio, or pasta maker, at Pastificio Di Martino, one of three major pasta factories in Gragnano.
Known as the “Città della Pasta” (City of Pasta), Gragnano became famous for its “white gold”, or macaroni, when it switched from primarily making silk in the late 1700s when silkworms suddenly started dying of a pest invasion.
The city’s dried pasta-making tradition dates back much further, though, according to professor and historian Giuseppe Di Massa, president of the Centro di Cultura e Storia di Gragnano e Monti Lattari Alfonso Maria Di Nola (Centre for Culture and History of Gragnano and the Lattari Mountains), who cites documents dating to the 1200s that speak of the production of seccata, or dried pasta. Around this same time, the personal doctor of King William II of Sicily, Giovanni Ferrario, who was also a professor at a medical school in Salerno, Italy, proclaimed the benefits of Gragnano’s dry pasta, advising patients with typhoid fever to eat al dente vermiculos, the predecessor to vermicelli, a long pasta slightly thicker than spaghetti.
Fresh pasta, a simple blend of wheat flour and water bound together by eggs, is more common in the regions of Piedmont, Lombardy and Veneto, where the dough is pressed through rollers to form tagliatelle or tortellini. Dry pasta, meanwhile, only requires two ingredients: water and durum wheat semolina, which is extruded through traditional bronze dies that provide a coarse texture to the final product, giving the pasta the capacity to soak up more sauce.
From the 360-degree vantage point on the top of the Pastificio Di Martino building, where semolina dust slips up from the vents forming the dust devils darting across the floor, it’s easy to see how Gragnano is positioned to be a natural pasta-making factory. The city is encased by mountains on three sides and the sea on the other, creating a rain shadow effect ideal for drying pasta slowly in the street over days as marine breezes blow in from the coast.
The buildings are staggered in a way so that the moist wind, which blows in several times a day, provides natural ventilation by forming a tunnel along the town’s ancient main thoroughfare, Via Roma, where the majority of factories were built.
If it wasn’t for the faint semolina powder rising into the air, you wouldn’t guess this sleepy coastal town was once one of the richest in the region in terms of pasta production.
“In the past, almost every family in Gragnano produced pasta,” Riccio said. “This has been an ancient tradition for over 250 years, with ‘white gold’ serving as the economy of the city.”
“Here, in Gragnano, we are much more addicted to dry pasta,” explained Nunzia Riccio, food technologist and quality control manager at Pastificio Di Martino, as we toured the factory.
In the 19th Century, Gragnano was one of the famous stopovers on the Grand Tour, when wealthy Europeans would complete their cultural education with a trip to study Europe’s ancient civilisations in Greece and Italy, checking off sites like the Parthenon and Pompeii the same way a college backpacker does today.
“When European nobles came to Gragnano, in order to prove they had done part of the Grand Tour, they would bring pasta back to say they have been to Gragnano,” Di Martino said.
By the mid-19th Century, the city’s dry pasta was so popular that the municipality of Gragnano started tearing down old buildings to make way for dozens of family-run factories that dried pasta on river reeds dangling like weeping willow branches outside their front door.
Gragnano’s pasta may now be dried in sealed production lines, but the air blowing on the engines is the same that once dried the strands dangling along the city’s streets.
As a way to pay homage to the city’s pasta heritage, Gragnano’s pasta makers still set up stands and cook in the street each September during the Festa della Pasta di Gragnano, a festival that first kicked off after World War Two as a way to revive Gragnano’s traditional pasta production and “act as an awareness tactic, so people knew what was happening behind closed factory doors”, Riccio said.
The city swells to five times its size as 100 000 people stream into town for the two-day event which sells nearly 5 000 plates of pasta per day. Big-name chefs set up live-cooking demos in the centre of town where the pasta historically hung in curtain-like strands along either side of the street. — BBC Travel.