How Cooking With a 98-Year-Old Italian Grandma Helped Heal My Grief: 'I'm Your Nonna Now' (Exclusive)

In 2019, I got an Italian grandmother for Christmas. Her name is Maria Volontà and she’ll be 100 years old in February. We’re not related by blood; and were strangers the day she first cooked me her Christmas Eve chickpea casserole, the same day she declared she was going to be my nonna now.

When Nonna Maria adopted me as her new pseudo-granddaughter, I was in my own late nonna’s native Calabria, at the tip of the toe of the Italian boot, on a research trip through its fascinating Greek-speaking enclave. I was writing a novel set in this region during the Christmas season of 1960. Trekking through the December sun-soaked hillsides from village to thousand-year-old cobblestoned village, I would sit down with elders in their 80s and 90s, witnesses to the history I was trying to record.

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Nonna Maria and her daughter, architect Antonella Casile, were referred to me by a friend of an acquaintance. I arrived at their house in Bova Marina at 2 p.m. with my notebook and my voice recorder, expecting I would stay perhaps two hours. (Yes, I had the absurd notion I was going to leave without dinner — almost like I had never met an Italian grandmother before). In the courtyard was a lemon tree groaning with fruit. December was early for lemons, but they were already bigger than my hand.

The nonagenarian who greeted me was not quite as tall as my chest, with black eyes set deep in a poignant spiral of worry lines, and such beatific grace in her expression that she made me think of the Virgin Mary statues in the many nearby churches. Maria, with her steel trap memory and musical speaking voice, proved to be the key I had been searching for to unlock the past.

She shared her memories, proverbs, poems and songs in her native Greco. We had only been chatting for a few hours when she suddenly reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “Do you still have your nonna?” she asked me. I had, in fact, lost my Italian grandmother one year earlier, when she was 98.

“Well, I am your nonna now,” Maria said, then added with charming humility, “if that’s all right.”

This precious friendship would bring me much solace over the panicked years of the pandemic we didn’t know was about to arrive — when my family would particularly cherish Maria’s hard-earned wisdom about surviving scarcity, finding joy in simplicity and connecting with others through spontaneous generosity.

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When supermarket shelves were at their emptiest, Maria suggested delicious sustenance staples from her impoverished childhood — polenta with roasted garlic; brothy pasta with a single egg cracked in it for protein — a reminder that you don’t need luxury to be nourished and satisfied. As 2020 marched on and lockdown unfolded, she reminded me that the reason we have holidays at all is because before our cushy modern era, treats were rare; a celebration once required labor and planning. Maria taught me how to reignite holiday joy by appreciating the old-fashioned loving labor involved in keeping traditions alive.

I was allowed to leave that night at 11 p.m. only on the promise that I would come back the next day for “something very special.” That turned out to be a chickpea casserole typically served on Christmas Eve, “la Vigilia,” a vegetarian feast for a holiday when no meat is allowed before midnight mass. My family’s holiday traditions now include Maria’s new — and very old — recipe for chickpea casserole, bestowed upon me by my new, and very old, nonna. The casserole has proven a vegetarian-friendly crowd-pleaser, hearty and elemental and hot and comforting, proof that what’s most ancient is sometimes also what’s most modern.

And after dinner, I was gently kidnapped, forced to take up residency with the mother-daughter duo for the duration of my two-week stay. Each evening, Maria stood at her stove, her 10 decades heavy in the stoop of her shoulders as she sautéed pan-softened pasta for the scholars and folk musicians who dropped by to visit. Watching Maria’s vibrant, patient generosity, the relentless charisma of a nonna at the height of her powers, was a balm on my still-grieving heart.

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Over the years that would follow when we couldn’t visit each other, Antonella kept us in touch by WhatsApp. I wrote my novel, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia, with my two Calabrian advisors looking over my shoulder, continuing my rigorous Greco cultural education as they sent me instructional videos for cooking Greco delicacies and demanded I respond with videos of my own to prove I was doing it the right way. I was honored to use their names for main characters in my novel about their beautiful, secret corner of the world.

Traditions are sacred because we make them sacred. Connecting with our heritage can bring us joy, but connecting with someone else’s heritage can be just as joyful, a gift to compliment our own precious traditions and brightening our commitment to them. We can choose to make new traditions sacred in the same way we can choose to make friends into family.

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The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames is available now, wherever books are sold.

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