With deft flicks of the wrist, Nunzia Caputo cuts small chunks off the end of a sausage-shaped roll of fresh pasta dough, squishes each of them into a distinctive hollow shape with her thumb and sends them skittering across a flour-covered wooden tabletop.
Gregarious and with a big smile, she is the best known of the “pasta grannies”, women who spend their days making a type of homemade pasta called orecchiette, Italian for “little ears”, in the labyrinth of narrow alleyways that make up the old town of Bari, a historic port in the south of Italy.
“Semolina, water and lots of love – these are the only ingredients, and this is our tradition,” she said, sitting at her kitchen table with a granddaughter who is equally adept at making the ear-shaped morsels.
The pasta-producing women of Bari have become a tourist attraction in recent years, embodying a classic Italian combination of good food, gastronomic tradition and joie-de-vivre that proves irresistible to legions of visitors and cruise ship passengers who eagerly buy their bags of pasta.
But the close-knit world of the pasta grannies has been convulsed of late by allegations that some of them are covertly buying factory-produced orecchiette, divvying it up into little sacks and passing it off as homemade.
The subterfuge began to unravel when white cardboard boxes that had contained commercially made pasta were found dumped in wheelie bins on the outskirts of the old town.
No one has been named, at least publicly, but beneath the ancient stone arches and wrought iron balconies of Bari Vecchia – the old town of Bari – there are dark mutterings that a few women got greedy.
The scandal has, inevitably, been dubbed “Orecchiette Gate”.
A 55-year-old pasta maker said: “Some of the women have been selling the commercially made stuff.”
“They shouldn’t have done it and now it’s given us all a bad name. My grandmother taught me to make orecchiette when I was five. If you are from here, if you come from this tradition, then you need to be honest, transparent,” she said outside the tiny home she shares with her 89-year-old mother in a whitewashed courtyard deep in the heart of the old town.
In response to the allegations, the authorities have decided to act.
They are introducing tough new rules and regulations for the pasta grannies, many of whom congregate along Via dell’Arco Basso – the street of the low arch – an alleyway close to Bari’s imposing 1,000-year-old castle.
There will be regular health and hygiene checks on their homes. They will also have to wear hair nets and, if they have long fingernails, rubber gloves. They will have to buy new fridges in which to keep their pasta products, separate from the fridges that they keep their food in.
Cooking utensils and surfaces will need to be disinfected and kept squeaky clean. They will have to attend a four-hour course which will earn them a food safety certificate.
Officials are compiling a map and a register of all the women who sell homemade pasta in the winding alleys of the old town.
Most important of all, they plan to introduce a stamp of authenticity, similar to those used for regional specialities such as wine and cheese, to guarantee to tourists that the pasta is homemade.
Pietro Petruzzelli, the city councillor in charge of economic development and tourism, said: “They’re small changes and they won’t cost the ladies much to adopt.
“We want to maintain the tradition of orecchiette making but at the same time make sure they are respecting the rules.”
Controversially, the women will no longer be allowed to make pasta outdoors, sitting at tables, chatting to each other in impenetrable local dialect, and displaying it on wooden trays.
Instead, they will have to make the orecchiette in their tiny, cramped kitchens, where it will be protected from dust, flies, bird droppings and everything else the environment can fling at. Their front doorways will have to be covered with fly nets or curtains.
The new rules have gone down like a plate of congealed carbonara. A meeting was held on Dec 10 between the pasta women and council officials but quickly deteriorated into a shouting match as the grannies protested against the rigorous new regime.
Mrs Caputo said: “We can’t work indoors because our kitchens are too small.
“In the summer, we’ll die of heat. We have to work outside.”
Bari, one of Italy’s southernmost cities, sweltered in temperatures of 42C this summer.
Teresa, a pasta maker in her seventies, said: “If they continue with all these demands, insisting we conform to the regulations, I’ll just pack up and stop work.”
But health officials are adamant and say it is too risky from a hygiene point of view – the women can no longer knead and pinch pasta dough in the street.
An official from the regional health authority said: “How many times have we read about a wedding where all the guests are rushed to hospital because of food that wasn’t kept properly?”
The whole business has proved so contentious that even the Catholic Church has got involved.
Father Franco Lanzolla, the parish priest from the Romanesque Cathedral of San Sabino, has stepped in to act as a mediator, treading a delicate line between the authorities and the pasta women. The raucous meeting was held in a room adjacent to the cathedral.
He says there is more at stake than just a few women making pasta in their cramped kitchens. “There’s a lot of unemployment here. Without work, there are many young people who can be tempted into criminality. But if there is work, you can give them hope, a future, self-esteem.”
The “pastaie” or female pasta producers have become a symbol of Bari, which is undergoing a tourist boom.
Jamie Oliver featured them in one of his cookbooks and Dolce & Gabbana shot a commercial featuring some of the women with the lingerie-clad daughters of Sylvester Stallone, whose family originates from Puglia.
Mrs Caputo has 60,000 followers on her Instagram account, Le Orecchiette di Nunzia.
“Nunzia has become a superstar,” said Anna, a local tour guide. “She went to Brazil once and was practically treated like the Pope.” In November, she met the real pontiff, shaking hands with Pope Francis at an audience in the Vatican and giving him some orecchiette as a gift.
Among the tourists taking photos of the pasta grannies in Via dell’Arco Basso was Ophelie Stoeckli, 28, from Lausanne, who was visiting with her sister and mother.
“I had heard about the pasta ladies – I saw them on TikTok and Instagram and I wanted to come and see them,” she said.
The reason why some of the pasta grannies were tempted into food fraud, selling commercial pasta that they pretended was their own, lies in the growing popularity of Bari as a destination.
As the number of tourists increased, so too did the demand for the pasta grannies’ products.
Francesco Petruzzelli, a local journalist who has covered the scandal in depth, said: “With so many tourists visiting, the ladies couldn’t keep up with demand.
“It’s hard work – it takes an hour to make a kilo of orecchiette and you need strong arms to knead the dough. That’s why they started buying commercial pasta and pretending it was their own. Tourists don’t know any better – they can’t distinguish between homemade pasta and the factory stuff.”
