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BARI, Italy — The grandmothers set up shop early. Out of ground-floor kitchens that opened directly onto the street, they came out singing old songs, sweeping the stone floor and scattering their homemade orecchiette, the city’s renowned ear-shaped pasta, on the mesh screens of wooden trays.

As the pasta dried in the sun along with the sweatpants, T-shirts and bath towels draped from the balconies above, Nunzia Caputo, 61, sat making more with her mother. A local man popped by to buy a kilo, which Ms. Caputo weighed out on an old-fashioned scale.

“Here it’s always fresh,” she said, in a kitchen cluttered with simmering pots of sauce, sacks of semola flour and a muted television. “If nobody buys them, we eat all of them. And this happens,” she said, pointing at her belly.