Broken Pasta and Bean Soup

This is the “pasta fazool” Dean Martin sings about in his goofy hit “That’s Amore.” Fasul is the Neapolitan pronunciation of fagioli, or beans, and this soup does indeed feature beans and pasta. I’ve found that adding regular dried pasta to the soup thickens it a bit too much, so I use no-boil lasagna noodle pieces or some of the new “one-pot” pasta shapes that are formulated to be cooked in the sauce, such as Barilla’s Pronto elbows or rotini. The result is a