This week’s highlight had to be our pasta-making class.

We returned to Massimo and Cecilia’s lovely restaurant, Osteria La Gramola in the heart of the small town of Tavernelle Val di Pesa on Wednesday to learn to make authentic pasta. My takeaway: I’m never buying dried pasta again.

For this class we were joined by two very fun couples from the Boston area — Steven and Linda and Bruce and Robin, who were in the middle of a two-week visit to Italy. Massimo had set up a work station in the middle of the dining room so we’d have plenty of room to maneuver around, and equipped it with five pasta machines, a bunch of tools like cutters and molds, and bowls of extra-fine semolina pasta.

Cecilia opened the class by explaining that the different regions of Italy have variations in their pasta dough recipe — in some areas, only eggs and flour, in others, water and flour or oil and flour. Here in Tuscany, the locals use an equal amount of egg and water. In our case, that translated to 100 grams of flour, 1 large egg and the equivalent amount of water.

She also explained that while semolina is the most common (and traditional) flour used in pasta making, you can also use whole wheat, spelt, multi-grain or a mixture of all of the above.

Next, we donned our aprons, rolled up our sleeves and dug in.

First, we made a little well in the semolina flour in our bowls and cracked an egg into the center. Then we used the empty eggshell to measure the water, ensuring an equal mixture of the two, and added a pinch of salt.

Then it was time to dive in. No utensils here, just your hands to mix the wet ingredients into the flour. It was a sticky business.

But eventually we got to the part where we could remove the dough from the bowl and mix by hand. This is where my experience making bread dough came in handy, because it took about 10 minutes of steady kneading to get the dough smooth and free of air pockets.

Now it was time to use the pasta machine! (Although, to be fair, Cecilia did say that you could use a mixer to blend the ingredients together. But I think that would be cheating.)

We rolled the dough through the machine with their rollers on the widest setting (“0”) about 8 times, then we cut the dough into smaller pieces, and began running it through the machine, each time making the distance between the rollers less and less to make the dough sheets thinner and thinner.

I’m quite pleased with my results!

Now it was time to make the shapes.

We started with cannelloni, a basic rectangular shape that is filled with a mixture of cheese, garlic and spinach and rolled like a burrito.

Next, we made a simple penne shape, where we rolled a square of pasta around the handle of a wooden spoon.

I got a bit lost in the next segment, but there were about four different shapes of filled pasta, a round one, a square one, a half-moon one and a couple different sizes of tortellini. I struggled with judging the right amount of filling so my shapes tended to spring leaks.

But I ROCKED the bowtie shape!

Then came my favorite part, when we folded long sheets of pasta crosswise into about 4 inch folds and cut segments about 3/4″ wide to make tagliatelle.

Finally, we moved to the cutter end of the pasta machine and rolled out fettuccine and spaghetti.

Nine shapes in all.

Now it was time to eat! Massimo warned us to pace ourselves, but I will confess it was difficult since everything set before us was AMAZING.

We began with our traditional antipasti — grilled bread rubbed with a clove of garlic, and topped with Extra Virgin Olive Oil and a dash of salt; Tuscan sausage with fennel, and two kinds of pecorino cheese — a “new” one and another that had been aged. I love this part.

Then it was our first pasta. I will confess that I didn’t take notes on the preparation, and I only thought to start taking photos about halfway through. So I’m not going to guarantee that this is an accurate list. But here’s what I remember:

• Mezzluna with sauteed garlic, cherry tomato halves and fresh basil.
• Bowties with sage, garlic and olive oil.
• Cannelloni in Bechamel sauce.
• Ravioli in a variety of sauces.
• Tagliatelle with duck sauce (my favorite)!
• Spaghetti with spicy tomato sauce.
• Fettuccine with porcini mushrooms.
• Tortellini with olive oil, butter and fresh white truffle shavings.

And in between courses, we chatted with our fellow students and discovered we had a lot of common interests and experiences. All the while, we observed the locals arriving for their lunch breaks and enjoying the fabulous food and service this lovely restaurant offers.

I found myself slipping into a pasta coma, but before I lost total consciousness I did manage to ask Cecilia to share the recipe for her duck sauce which I had ordered during one of our prior visits to the restaurant. And I got it! Whoot!

And when I returned to the house for an afternoon nap, I did a quick Amazon search and placed an Italian-made pasta machine on my wish list to order as soon as we get home.

I think we’ll tackle the tagliatelle with duck sauce first. Yum!