But the word is just a label on a much older thing.Nonna's Quick Pasta
The seven things our grandmothers knew
These are not life hacks. They are habits that were normal in 1950 and went missing somewhere along the way. Italian grandmothers kept them. The rest of us did not.
1. The slow Sunday is a sacred thing
Sunday in a nonna's house is not a recovery day from the week. It is a day with its own gravity. A pot starts simmering before lunch. Bread rests under a towel. The kitchen smells the same every Sunday because the work is the same every Sunday. Repetition is not a failure of imagination. It is a kind of prayer.
If you want one book that puts this in your hands, Pasta Grannies by Vicky Bennison 👵🏻 is the closest thing. Eighty real Italian grandmothers, photographed in their kitchens, with the recipes they cook for their own families. The cover alone settles the body.
2. The table is a small temple
A nonna would not eat in front of a screen. Not because she was told not to. Because it would not occur to her. The table is where the food is. The food is the point. You sit. You eat. You talk to whoever else is there, or you sit with the quiet, or you watch the light change.
The hardest part of nonnamaxxing for most modern people is not the cooking. It is the eating.
3. The evening walk is a non-negotiable
The Italian word for this is la passeggiata. After dinner, you walk. Slowly. With someone or alone. There is no app counting steps. There is no fitness goal. You walk because you walked yesterday. The walk is its own thing.
Ten minutes is enough. The point is the daily-ness, not the distance.
4. Your hands need work that your phone cannot give them
A nonna knits, embroiders, mends, kneads, prunes, sweeps, polishes, peels. Not because she has to. Because hands that move on their own free a mind that has been working too hard. Her hands and her mind have an agreement that modern hands forgot how to make.
Pick one. Knitting if you like soft things. Sourdough if you like a project. A houseplant if you like to be reminded that something is alive.
5. Rest is a season, not a failure
This is the one that hurts the most to relearn. A nonna does not feel guilty for being tired. She does not have a comeback story to write. When she is tired, she is tired, and the day adjusts. The work waits. The world does not end.
The book to read alongside this practice is Wintering by Katherine May. It is not Italian, but the message is the same. Rest is a season. Recovery is a practice. You are not behind on life because you needed a month off. It reads like a friend sitting on the end of your bed telling you it is allowed to be hard right now.
6. Small comforts do not need to be earned
A nonna does not produce a result to deserve her cup of coffee in the morning. She does not finish her chores to deserve the candle. Comfort is not the reward at the end of the day. Comfort is the texture of the day.
If you want a book to keep on your bedside table for this practice, The Comfort Book by Matt Haig is the right one. Short, gentle, no plot. The kind of book you can pick up and put down for a year. A nonna would approve of it.
7. You are allowed to stay where you are
A nonna lives in a kitchen she knows by heart, on a street where she knows the baker, in a town where her family lives. She is not a digital nomad. She is rooted. Modern life makes this hard for most of us, but the principle still works at a smaller scale. Have a coffee shop you go to. Stay in regular touch with the same handful of people. Notice the same tree through four seasons.
If you have ever read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert you remember the Italy section is the section. Watch a woman learn, badly and slowly, how to be in one place again. Skip the rest if you want.
How to start without overhauling your life
You do not need to change everything to remember any of this. Three small moves are enough for week one.
One Sunday this month: Pick a recipe that takes three or four hours of low heat. Make it without your phone in the kitchen.
Twice this week: Eat dinner at a table with no screen for thirty minutes. Just twice. Notice if the second meal feels different.
Every evening: Walk for ten minutes after you eat. Slow. No goals. No tracker.
Do these for one week and you have already remembered three of the seven things. The other four can wait.
The quiet thing underneath all of this
The reason nonnamaxxing is spreading is not that Gen Z invented something. It is that an entire generation noticed how heavy their lives have become and reached, by some collective instinct, for the lightest thing they could find. An Italian grandmother in her kitchen. A pot. A walk. A cushion. A candle.
Nothing about that is new. We just lost track of it for a while.
The good news is that none of it is gone. It is still there in the recipe that takes too long. In the table without a screen. In the walk that does not count steps. In the hand that picks up a needle. In the small comfort that does not have to be earned.
Maybe your nonna was right about everything. Maybe ours were too. We just have to remember how to listen.
This article was derived from whitelily.blog/2026/05/nonnamaxxing-italian-grandmothers-know.html
