If you ever find yourself in Emilia-Romagna on the first Sunday of the month, set aside your morning— you’re in for a treat.
The town of Pavullo, in the province of Modena, wakes up with monthly mercati e mercatini. During these weekends, the streets fill with stalls offering a little bit of everything: from handmade crafts, and antiques laid out on tables for display. This is the place where pasta-making equipment finds its next rightful owner. Goods are laid out with each vendor, patiently on display as they wait for the right person to come along and take them home. Here, you don’t find the rolling pin or the cutter; it finds you! It’s also quite the social occasion with nonnas, nonnos, and pasta-makers gathering.
And, if you were to head a little further down towards Bologna, and you’ll find another market: the Mostra Scambio ai Portici di Medicina. This bustling swap shop is all about collectibles and curiosities. Walking under the porticoes, you pass tables piled with vintage tools, rare books, and objects you didn’t know you needed until you saw them.
When we visited, we met Paolo, our resident pasta chef (you can find out more about him here) and he showed us the ropes on the hunt for the perfect bit of equipment. Paolo is a dab-hand at making Sfogline (he recently competed in a competition). Sfogline requires sheets of pasta to be rolled out at huge huge thin sheets. It’s a real skill, and for that it also requires specific equipment. A sfoglino like Paolo looks for a really long rolling pin (up to 1.20 meters) to ensure he can make the marvellously large sfoglia. And later in the afternoon, he showed us exactly how he used his new purchases.
Online shopping exists in Italy, but many of the local prefer to keep things closer to home. These markets are not only sustainable, offering low-waste, low-emissions ways to shop as they ensure that items find new welcoming home; they’re also chance to foster community and conversation and you’ll regularly find people to catching up with one another, compare goods as they sip their cappuccinos.
Livia and Paolo were taking photos, but if you look closely further behind, you can see others are more engrossed in inspecting some pasta cutters! Honestly, this is the sort of place you can easily while away hours; each piece carrying its own story. Some are carved with delicate patterns, others plain, and they all are a little and worn from decades of use.
Once you have a mattarello which has stood the test of time in your hand, you can so easily imagine the kitchens its been used in, the flour-dusted tables, and the families gathered around bowls of fresh pasta. Call it second-hand, sustainable, or up-cycling; whatever your label of choice, one thing we think is real, when they’ve been offered up by Pasta Grannies, all of these items are definitely, pre-loved.
Fancy updating your pasta essentials and don’t have a market next to you? Check out our favourite things here.
And if Sfogline rolling is peaking your interest, you can read more about the champions of Sfogline in this blog article. Plus, Club members can watch the behind-the-scenes videos of us following Nonna Ada a festival at the competition last year.
