The documented preparation belongs to the Lombard areas of Brescia and Mantua, where pumpkin is not a garnish but the body of the dough. Pumpkin purée is combined with flour, eggs and seasoning until a gnocchi mixture comes together, ready to be shaped. That first move already sets the dish apart: the vegetable is worked in, not merely served beside the dumplings. You can almost feel the cook judging the wetness of the purée against the flour, looking for a mass that will hold without turning heavy. Nothing in the record asks for spectacle; it asks for attention to a simple, seasonal paste.
Some versions introduce crushed amaretti into the mixture. The biscuits are not required, yet when they appear they change the character of the dough from the inside, a quiet extra rather than a topping scattered at the end. The choice sits inside the same pumpkin base, so the gnocchi remain recognisably of one family even as the kitchen decides whether to keep the mix spare or to fold in that crumb. Curiosity lives in that fork in the recipe: the same orange paste, two slightly different interiors.
A documented finish uses butter scented with garlic and rosemary. It is one recorded dressing, not a claim that every plate must wear the same cloak, but it is enough to imagine the dumplings leaving the water and meeting a pan that smells of herb and allium rather than of nothing at all. The butter does the last work: it coats, it carries the scent, it asks you to eat while the gnocchi are still tender. What remains unresolved is how you will meet them—plain pumpkin dough, or dough with amaretti—and whether that buttered finish will be the one that brings you back to Brescia and Mantua on the plate.