GRAGNANO, Campania — We spoke to Giuseppe Di Martino at his pastificio (pasta production laboratory) in Gragnano, a hilltop town outside Naples. He says the village’s geography, made up a rare confluence of mountain wind, sea air, and light, makes it a place almost purpose-built by nature for the art of drying pasta. His family has been making Pasta di Gragnano IGP here for over a century, using 100 percent Italian wheat, bronze dies, and slow low-temperature drying, across a repertoire of 260 handcrafted shapes. Pasta, Giuseppe says, will never make you rich, but it will never let you go hungry either. This is a philosophy almost old as the town itself, and one the Di Martinos live and work by.

Giuseppe also spoke to us about the logic of shape, about how every curve and ridge exists to give better company to the ingredients it carries. He reflected on the pasta house’s collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana, which gave rise to the Devozione restaurant in New York. And he drew a line connecting pasta to opera, to Puccini, to the San Carlo in Naples, which the pastificio sponsors. All of it, he said, expressions of the same Italian way of living, carried by immigrants to the four corners of the world.