Quick! What are everyone’s two favorite Italian foods??!!
I hear you, I hear you shouting “PIZZA AND PASTA!!!”
Well you can thank the Napolitani for that, because both pizza and pasta originate in Naples and weren’t widely known, eaten or cooked outside of the south until after World War II. American GI’s are credited for increasing the awareness of pizza, but pasta is a different story.
Dried pasta has long been a staple of southern Italy but is a fairly new addition to the northern Italian diet. Northern regions like Tuscany, Lombardy and the Veneto have always relied on bread, polenta and rice for their starches, with fresh egg pasta made on Sundays and holidays. As southern Italians moved north to find jobs in factories after WWII and brought their favorite food staple of dried semolina-based pasta with them, it began to be sold and eaten in the homes of northern Italians as well.
Where two generations ago few Italians north of Rome ate dried pasta, now Italians everywhere don’t feel complete unless they’ve had at least one plate of pasta a day. Large pasta companies like Barilla and DeCecco, among others, opened massive factories in the north to keep up with the demand.
But if you truly want to understand pasta, you must go south to the area around the Bay of Naples.
Gragnano, along with the neighboring town of Torre Annunziata, has been a pasta-making center since the late 1800’s and was designed with pasta in mind. Located on the eastern side of the Bay of Naples under the shadow of a volcano, the constant sea breezes and humidity were ideal for drying pasta. The fertile valley of Vesuvius, with its volcanic soil, was ideal for growing durum wheat, and the fresh water from the mountains combined to produce the perfect pasta. On the banks of a river lined with mills for grinding durum wheat into semolina flour, the streets lie perpendicular to the Sorrento coast to take advantage of the constant sea breezes that were used to dry the strands of pasta. There are many old photos from the early 20th century showing racks and racks of long spaghetti lining the streets and balconies, drying in the open air. 
It’s a more hygienic operation these days with the pasta being made and dried indoors, but on an artisan scale. Using time honored methods for extruding and drying the pasta, the pasta of Gragnano differs dramatically from modern industrially produced pasta in two important ways: adherence of the sauce and chewiness.
Modern pasta factories use Teflon dies to extrude pasta shapes, which makes the pasta slick, allowing sauce to slide off rather than adhere. The artisan method utilizied in Gragnano uses original bronze dies which are inherently rough, catching the dough and texturing it, which makes the pasta hold onto its sauce better.
The other important difference is the drying time. In modern factories, where time is money, pasta is dried in large ovens for 2-4 hours, depending on the shape and thickness. In Gragnano they understand that long, slow drying results in denser, more elastic pasta, which when cooked has a satisfying chewiness. Drying times can be anywhere from 10 hours to 7 days. Here time isn’t money, it’s quality.
Gragnano has several artisan pasta factories that you can tour to experience first hand the hot and humid environment necessary for making excellent pasta. The valley of Vesuvius is no longer used to grow wheat, they turn to vast fields in Canada for that. But the local water and the pride in Campania’s pasta culture and history combine to offer a product which has no equal in the north.
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