A pasta town, a family firm founded in 1912 and a new, smaller factory.

Pastificio dei Campi makes dried pasta in Gragnano, a town in the metropolitan area of Naples whose name is protected on pasta packs. Its pasta is sold as Pasta di Gragnano IGP, a protected geographical indication: the European Commission registered the name by an implementing regulation of 2 October 2013, published that month in the EU’s Official Journal, according to Fondazione Qualivita, which tracks Italian food designations. Under the rules, the pasta must be made and packed within the municipality of Gragnano.

The company grew out of a Gragnano pasta family. The Gruppo Di Martino says Giuseppe Di Martino founded his pasta factory in Gragnano in 1912; that the Fascist regime forced it to change its name to Pastificio Impero; that the factory was heavily damaged in the Second World War; and that after the war it took back its original name and launched an export brand, Napolina, which was later sold and is still used in Britain. Since the 1990s, the group says, it has been led by the founder’s grandchildren, the siblings Giuseppe and Giovanna Di Martino, children of Valerio Di Martino, who serve respectively as the group’s president and its head of purchasing.

Pastificio dei Campi came from that generation. Its own website, as archived in 2010, said the company was born in 2007 from the initiative and “desire for innovation” of the young partners of the historic Pastificio Di Martino, founded in Gragnano in 1912, as a new factory meant to make pasta of the highest quality that was both an expression of a tradition and a territory and in step with the times. The Di Martino group’s own timeline gives 2009 as the year the Pastificio dei Campi brand and its Gragnano factory were born, and its brands page describes the company as founded in 2009.

A later version of the company’s “about” page traces the idea further back. It says that in 2004 Giuseppe Di Martino, a third-generation Gragnano pasta maker, realised that the traceability of the wheat used to make Italian pasta was approximate, stopping at a certain point in the supply chain so that neither the consumer nor often the pasta maker could tell where the main ingredient, durum wheat semolina, came from. That, the company says, was the project that led to Pastificio dei Campi. It chose to buy wheat from Puglia, in the Tavoliere plain and the Daunian sub-Apennine hills, which it describes as historically devoted to growing durum wheat.

A cube with six faces, and a pasta shape in the ADI Design Index.

The company has always made a point of its packaging. On its 2010 website, in a page headed “Il design,” it said there was “a dream, an idea, a purpose” behind its boxes: to bring 500 years of pasta history back to life, to give a face to the people who make the pasta, and to tell the whole production process through a few images and phrases printed on the pack. Each box was a cube of card, with plastic windows that could be separated for recycling so the pasta could be seen while the box was closed; the band naming the shape doubled as a seal of guarantee. A company blog post of the same year said photographs of the people who work at the factory were printed on the faces of the cube.

The company explained the choice of shape at some length. A cube, it said, has six faces that can all be used to communicate and to give a voice to everyone in the supply chain, in line with the company’s founding value of transparency; a regular shape is also easy to stack and display in a shop, and the box was designed to be reused as a container. It also said the packing was always done by hand in Gragnano, with every single box filled manually. At the Salone del Gusto food fair in Turin in 2010, a company blog described its stand as built around “a big black and red cube.”

The design drew outside notice. In May 2010 the company’s blog thanked Stefano Caffarri for a long review on Spigoloso, part of the Dissapore food-site network, which focused on its penne mezzani rigate, its packaging and its website; the same post said the factory made between 20 and 30 quintals of pasta a day, and the company’s 2010 site described its production of 30 quintals a day as a limited-edition line for gourmets.

The best-known design project is a pasta shape. The Campotti, according to the company, are a project by the food designer Mauro Olivieri for Pastificio dei Campi: a short, wide tube pinched at the centre into a figure of eight, keeping the perimeter of the original shape while reducing its diameter. The company says the Campotti were selected for the ADI Design Index 2011, the yearbook of Italy’s industrial-design association, and were the only food product in that edition. The design magazine Design Street reported in March 2013 that they were being shown at the MART museum in Trento and Rovereto. In May 2014 the food site Italia Squisita reported that the Campotti had received an honourable mention at the 23rd Compasso d’Oro, Italy’s best-known design award, and quoted Giuseppe Di Martino as saying that industrial design can open new paths even in well-established fields.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make pasta, and all of them come from Italy: Granoro, Pastificio dei Campi, Di Martino, Setaro, Benedetto Cavalieri, Agnesi and Giovanni Rana. Italian pasta makers in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small family workshops that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and the same word, pasta, covers both dried shapes made from durum wheat semolina and fresh or filled pasta sold from the chiller.

A pasta brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single shape than by a pack, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its pasta is actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its pasta is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A small Gragnano factory inside a larger family group.

Pastificio dei Campi sits within a larger business. The Gruppo Di Martino lists it among its brands alongside Pasta Di Martino, the family’s original Gragnano pasta, and Antonio Amato, the Salerno pasta maker the group says it acquired in 2012; its timeline also records a new plant at Pastorano, in the province of Caserta, in 2006, and the purchase of the Emilian fresh-pasta maker Grandi Pastai in 2017. The food site Italia Squisita described Giuseppe Di Martino as the owner of Pastificio dei Campi in 2014.

The group describes Pastificio dei Campi as the peak of its search for quality. It says the Gragnano factory makes about 54 pasta shapes from old wheat varieties grown under a three-year crop rotation, and that every pack is traced through the Total Tracking System, which lets buyers look up the dates on which the wheat was sown and harvested and the pasta made and packed. The company’s own site has described the tracking system as open to every consumer through its website since the company began.

The company also describes its arrangements with farmers. On its “about” page it says it asked growers in Puglia to return to the old practice of three-year rotation, giving up high yields, and that it pays the farmers every year, including years when no wheat is due to be harvested from their land. It says its pasta holds a “100% Made in Italy” certification, which it presents as a further step in the traceability of its Pasta di Gragnano IGP. These are the company’s own descriptions of its supply chain.

The company has also used its website to talk about pasta more widely. By 2010 it carried recipes, a glossary and news, and the company’s blog was written under the persona of “Mafaldina”; a 2010 post said the site and the character had been created to convey the company’s philosophy, give everyone direct contact with production and spread the culture of pasta.

For a design guide, Pastificio dei Campi shows how a pack can carry a brand’s whole argument: a cube that shows the faces of its makers and a tracking system that leads back to the wheat. Compare Di Martino, the family’s original Gragnano brand, and Garofalo, another Gragnano pasta maker. For this guide we use cube black, a Campi red and semolina with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pastificio dei Campi’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.