If you’ve spent time on social media lately, you may have noticed a new kind of wellness icon emerging. This beloved figure is not a biohacker or a fitness influencer but someone’s Italian grandmother.
It’s all part of a trend called “nonnamaxxing,” which is less about optimizing and more about embracing simplicity.
“‘Nonnamaxxing’ is a recent trend where people adopt the daily rhythms of an Italian grandmother, or nonna,” Martina Carucci, a strategist with the language learning app Preply, told HuffPost. “It’s essentially borrowing a lifestyle that Italian culture has practiced for generations and giving it a fun name.”
This nonna lifestyle, she explained, can include “cooking old-fashioned recipes from scratch like handmade gnocchi or osso buco, tending an herb garden, taking slow walks or ‘passeggiata,’ sharing long meals with loved ones, and limiting screen time.”
Reverence for older women and their practices goes back generations in that part of the world. “But ‘nonnamaxxing’ as a term has traveled well beyond Italy,” said Noël Wolf, a linguist and cultural expert at the language learning platform Babbel. “It’s been adopted across cultures to describe a universal archetype ― the older woman who lives simply, cooks well, stays socially connected and moves through life at a sustainable pace.”
