It is the way they pleat and fold that makes them so satisfying. First on the plate and then again in your mouth. Pappardelle are typical of all the central and central-northern Italian regions, each one boasting a slightly different width, anything from 2.5 to 6cm. The Tuscans gave it the name; it comes from pappare, the colloquial, to eat. Fresh

Penne is a doubly good sauce collector, both on its ridges, and – like a dip pen collecting ink – in its slanted tip.

While classic ridged penne are the widely consumed favourites, and Italy’s second most sold shape, there are penne variations. Bigger pennoni (my favourite of the family), and in descending order of size siblings, pennette, pennine and pennettine, also mezze penne, half sized, which are ideal with peas, lemon and mascarpone.

They take their name from the onomatopoeic paccarià, Neapolitan for ‘to slap’. Which is exactly what they do when cooked, like soft sacs, they slap and flap when you toss them in the sauce, then again in your mouth. Along with rigatoni, paccheri are my preferred shape, and one of the best ways to understand good quality pasta, its porous surface,

Also a 3kg bag of archetti, little curved remnants, reminders that before it was cut spaghetti hung over a stick.

The way pasta is cooked in Campania and Naples is beautiful choreography. Often, pasta is removed from the boiling water – usually with a spider sieve – before it reaches the desirable point of al dente. This means that the last minutes of pasta cooking are done in with the sauce. In these last minutes, usually in a pan large enough to really jolt

At the foot of the Monti Lattari mountain range, 30 kilometres south-east of Naples, 15 from Vesuvius and round the cape from Sorrento, is a town called Gragnano. It is part of a staggering landscape, vertiginous, volcanic and productive – lemons, tomatoes, olives, grapes and pasta. If the story of pasta is a vast jigsaw, Gragnano is a vital piece.

It is made using the same technique as is used to make North African couscous: water is sprinkled, a little at a time, over flour in a wide-bottomed dish, which is then rubbed in a rotary movement until – like a snowball gathering layers as it rolls – balls form. The fregula is then toasted.

fusilli, single or double spiral, is the third most popular shape in Italy.