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.