Gragnano

Gragnano is the city of pasta, and not as a figure of speech: the protected designation covers a tradition that begins at the end of the sixteenth century, favoured by the damp wind off the Lattari mountains, which dries the macaroni slowly, and by the spring water that turned some thirty mills. But before macaroni this was a town of textiles, so much so that piazza Aubry is still the tannery square to local people, and what changed the town's trade was a disaster: in 1783 a die-off of the silkworms stopped production, and from then on everyone turned to pasta. In the nineteenth century the pasta works hung the macaroni out to dry in the middle of via Roma and piazza Trivione: the streets were the drying racks.

Success was such that Gragnano obtained a railway of its own to export the pasta, and at its opening, on the twelfth of May 1885, Umberto I and queen Margherita were present. The town, for that matter, had twice been born of a flight: the first time when Sulla put down the revolt of Stabiae and the rebels took refuge up here, the second when the eruption that buried Pompeii sent more of the Stabian people looking for shelter on the Lattari. There remain the Valley of the Mills, with its ruins and the nativity scene the local craftsmen set up there, the only Napoleonic arch in all Campania, and a recent speciality, the panuozzo, which in twenty years has multiplied the town's pizzerias fivefold. A city only since 2024, Gragnano has Castellammare and the Sorrento peninsula ten minutes away.