A historical adventure deep in the very heart of pasta country in southern Italy unexpectedly unearths a sauce with roots in Senegal

About 30 kilometres south of Naples, the town of Gragnano is surrounded by the Monti Lattari mountain range – the limestone backbone of the Sorrento peninsula. Historically, a series of natural springs fed into a larger stream called Vernotico, which flowed down the mountainside, passing through what was at the time the small village of Gragnano.

The natural slope of the terrain was fortuitous, because it allowed for the construction of a sequence of mills, which started in around 1263. During a visit to Gragnano last month, local historian Giuseppe Di Massa explained how it all worked; how gravity drove the flow of water from one mill to the next, in order to power vertical millstones – a system created for the inconsistent flow. The valley, with its clever water system, became known as the valley of the mills; its role milling grain, which arrived at the nearby port of Castellammare di Stabia, a vital operation to Naples and surrounding towns.

This article was amended on 30 October 2026 to correct misspellings of pasta makers Garofalo and Ducato d’Amalfi.

A new report has found many crops are far less nutritious than they once were, so we need to eat more of them. Here is how to get your five portions of fruit and veg a day, easily and affordably – and potentially increase that to ten

When Eva Humphries first started working as a nutritionist, she met a client who had just found out he had high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and was on the verge of type 2 diabetes. He had no idea how to change his diet or lifestyle.

The man broke down and cried for 45 minutes, leaving Humphries with “no idea of what to do”, she says. In the final 15 minutes of the session, scrambling for a quick but helpful message, she finally said: “When you look at a plate of food, can you just make half of it veg for me?”