On a quiet, two-lane road that connects the former railroad town of Altoona to State College, you smell the pasta sauce before you spot the rides, the pizza, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. You smell the sauce before you enter the factory offices of DelGrosso Foods. Before you find Joe DelGrosso, chief of the family sauce business, at a conference table in black slacks. Before he tells you that they don’t call it “gravy” in these parts. Before you persuade Joe to roll up those pants and wade into his Italian-themed water park next door for a picture in front of a water-spouting Pisa.

You are disoriented. It smells and sounds like Marra’s or Ralph’s in South Philly, but instead of seeing rowhouses, you’re in the wide-open belly of central Pennsylvania. There’s a squat gravy factory along the road, accordion music in the air, and a lush mountain ridge along Pleasant Valley Boulevard in this place the post office calls Tipton, Pa.