Baking, pottery, hand sewing: is there a future for these, or is it just nostalgia?

But is this a matter of old age or youth? In other words, is this nostalgia I sense all around me the result of a natural waning of interest in modernity (we are too worn out to make sense of it), due to advancing age, or is it a sign of youth? In that case, is this nostalgia a new kind of nostalgia? In other words, a vantage point from which we can glimpse a shift in customs that will throw our world into crisis. How should we interpret this nostalgia? To stick with recent trends, let’s take the ‘granny-maxxing’ phenomenon, which is all the rage. ‘Nonna-maxxing’: a new sort of grandmother who revives but reinvents the traditions of the grandmother of old. The new grandmother does the things my grandmother used to do, but these things don’t seem old-fashioned at all – no, not in the slightest. The new grandmothers revive old customs and traditions and make them the envy of all. In their kitchens, there’s not a hint of Gozzanian atmosphere; you don’t sense that tranquil beauty of attics where centuries-old clutter slumbers – quite the opposite: the ‘granny-maxxing’ kitchen is a place of harmony. Here, one doesn’t simply cook; one meditates. Because the soups are prepared slowly, the vegetables – need I even say it? – are all in season (fun fact: do you think aubergines are a winter or summer crop? What about fennel? What’s their real season?), then you take the olive oil straight from the olive tree in the garden, and the pasta (need I say more?) is homemade: simple, often humble foods. In short, if you cook ‘Grandma-Maxxing’ style, you’ll reach culinary Nirvana. It’s a blessing. You don’t even have to go to India; you save money and you don’t have to take that ‘purifying’ bath in the not-so-clean Ganges. Other strengths of these grandmothers: they’re all in good health. Grandmothers don’t go to the gym, but because they get plenty of exercise – climbing stairs, doing the shopping, tending the vegetable patch – they’re in perfect health. There’s also something to be said about relationships, which are so problematic these days. They’re almost always toxic, with pathological narcissism lurking in the background, whereas in the world of ‘granny-maxxing’, you feel at ease in each other’s company. Why? Because certain traditions from the past are being rediscovered. For example, Sunday lunches and pleasant chats centred on simplicity (talking about homemade pasta, the vegetable patch and seasonal fruit).

What is it? A glimpse into the past, or a way of transforming the world by drawing on the past? On the one hand, it seems rather nostalgic. I mean, I could be a grandad myself. In fact, this raises another question: how old are Italian grandmothers? Age matters; it’s a dividing line that helps us understand the beauty and the danger of nostalgia. Were they born in the 1950s? The 1960s? If so, of course they’re in good shape and can behave like ‘maxxers’. It’s easy to see why. You have to take into account the earnings-related pension system and the various blood pressure tablets. If, on the other hand, grandmothers and grandfathers were born earlier – say, in the 1940s or 1950s – well, that generation might be starting to suffer from a few aches and pains. I am also certain they have grown rather fed up with cooking. Not to mention unpleasant conditions like dementia: but these are trifles, things that social media – caught up in ‘granny-maxxing’ nostalgia – does not pay too much attention to.

So, on the one hand, we can discuss classic nostalgia – the kind that leads one not so much to remember as to idealise. Italy, moreover, possesses this charm: it is the ideal place for idealisation. The place where singers sing of ‘my village all lit up’. In homage to these illuminated places, people proclaim ‘long live the grandmothers’, ‘long live the village’, ‘long live the festivals and processions’. And we swear we’ll come back here to live, just like them, with the slow pace of life and good food. Not now, but one day. In the meantime, we come back, we eat, but then we leave again – incidentally, it would be interesting to understand why Italy, in agriculture and the agri-food sector, is highly innovative but isn’t perceived as such. On the contrary, all anyone talks about is grandmothers.

Still on the subject of interesting things that have disappeared, the historian Edward Palmer Thompson, whilst studying 19th-century textile workers, noted that almost all writings concerning these workers were ‘pervaded by the legend of better times’. Another historian, Robin Veder, describes the flowers that the craftspeople cultivated (and then wove into their designs) as a symbol of loss. “The weavers,” he writes, “mourned the flowers as substitutes for their lost craft culture.” What can one say: they felt a sense of nostalgia for their own lost skills.

All that on the one hand. But on the other hand, I wonder: is that all there is to it? Or am I merely ridiculing a phenomenon? From the lofty heights of my arrogance as an unquestioning innovator, am I merely highlighting what suits me to highlight? I pick out the most paradoxical, trendy aspects and poke fun at them. When we stand there watching and judging young people worn out by modern life (who are interested in sewing and cooking and want to live like farmers) with the pomposity of someone who says: ‘Ah, in my day I used to work 14 hours a day, I didn’t complain, and I did this and that’, well, I’m challenging a nostalgic sentiment with a nostalgic attitude – as if to say: ‘sacrifices aren’t what they used to be’.

It’s fair to file all this away under the usual heading of nostalgia. Today, those exhausted young people ask themselves: but why? Why do I have to make sacrifices? In whose name? To which capitalist saint should I be grateful for the 1,500 euros a month, the 1,000 euros in rent, the forced cohabitation, the Excel spreadsheets, the AI, the refresher courses, the Zoom meetings, the overtime, the working weekends? Why? Can I try to look to the past to shape the future? Can I be happy on a farm where animals all live in peace? Can I rediscover manual labour that has endured for millennia and which, among other things, offers its own rewards? In short, the family in the woods – legal vicissitudes aside – stems directly from the utopian thinking of the 1960s, from that hippie and anti-capitalist mindset. These are people who have made a choice: let’s get away from the madding crowd, let’s rebuild the world, let’s remain human.

Furthermore, when more and more people tell you about beekeeping, home baking and leatherworking, are they merely indulging in fanciful fantasies of escapism from reality (which is, admittedly, stressful), or are these people at the forefront of a new movement? Citizens who, by rediscovering old practices, are proposing a radically new approach to work? In other words, are they suggesting that the present is not enough for us? Indeed, are they disappointed by it and would rather look to a grandparent as a role model than an influencer who flatters you, bosses you about, makes you subscribe to their value system and, in essence, makes you work your fingers to the bone for nothing?

I ask myself this because it’s not just a matter of a few fanatics, champions of the bread of yesteryear. And no, because, on a large scale, we all seem to be gripped by the same nostalgic sentiment. Streaming platforms are full of reality shows in which people compete to learn how to cook, work with ceramics, sew, blow glass or forge metal. Etsy, an online marketplace specialising in handmade and vintage goods, now has more than 5 million sellers. Vintage items too. The French work jacket, the bleu de travail, is now sold by luxury fashion houses to people who will never set foot in a factory.

So, is this mere nostalgia, or is a proposal being put forward for a different way of working and living? The American philosopher Matthew Crawford (to name but one, as his book was a success at the time), who left his job at a think tank to open a motorbike repair workshop, wrote a best-selling book on this kind of transition, entitled "Shop Class as Soulcraft" (2009), in which he argues that specialised manual labour gives us access to a form of thinking that office work denies us. The daily newspaper La Repubblica often publishes stories of individuals (often well-off with a generous severance package) who have left their jobs to return to their roots, and these stories all have the same tone: “I used to be an unhappy manager; now I’m a farmer, a beekeeper, a potter, a happy pasta-maker.” So, does this nostalgic sentiment stem from old age (and an inability to analyse the world) or from youth (which holds out the prospect of a new world)?

It’s worth giving this some thought, not least because these waves of nostalgia are becoming ever more acute as artificial intelligence promises – or threatens – to automate this or that job, and more generally everything that human beings are capable of doing. The more announcements there are to this effect, the more these longings grow. Nostalgia runs rampant. Nostalgia risks becoming the theme of the future. We want work done by hand, handcrafted products, tradition and folklore. We dream of the old forms of specialised labour. To complicate matters, let us also ask ourselves: when we fetishise the skills and customs of the distant past, are we not in danger of falling into a reactionary form of Luddism that resists all change? It’s a complex issue, I reckon; we need to explore the nature of nostalgia.

Just a brief note on etymology. The word ‘nostalgia’ derives from two Greek roots: nóstos (‘returning home’) and álgos (‘longing’). Philosophers help us to interpret the word. It could also refer to a longing for a home that no longer exists or never did. Nostalgia is a feeling of loss and, at the same time, of repressing that loss. It is a sense of reclaiming, but also of the illusion of possession. Nostalgia, in short, is a complex concept. The Odyssey is the story of stories, as it is one of the earliest stories to have developed in the Mediterranean, first orally and then put into writing (it is generally dated to between 730 and 710 BC). As the story of stories, it also tells us what the purpose of all stories is. Since we are living beings born to tell and believe in stories, the Odyssey also tells us something about ourselves. The Odyssey tells us that the purpose of stories is to return home. Which, of course, in the poem is a geographical place: Ithaca. But in everyday life, in the shared sentiment we experience, Ithaca is also a calling, a symbol. Returning home means setting time in motion once more. Odysseus, like all of us, is stranded on an island so marvellous that it seems like Paradise: so Odysseus might as well be dead, and that is why he wants to return home, even if it means enduring Poseidon’s wrath once more, because returning means feeling alive. To live, even at the cost of drowning. Just like all of us when, despite living in a wonderful, prosperous, capitalist country, we wonder whether we should give it all up – electricity, protection against disease – and return to a country where iron is forged by hand and food is cooked slowly in tune with the rhythm of the seasons (so down with seasonal standardisation: no parmigiana in winter and no fennel in summer), even if only to write about it for La Repubblica, which has been a must-read for this genre for years. Is that too much? Perhaps, but returning home through the lens of nostalgia takes many forms: reclaiming that part of ourselves we have forgotten, piecing together a fragmented self. Are we, or are we not, lovers of returning home? After all, when a loved one dies, the officiant consoles us: they have returned to their Father’s house. However, as we were saying, nostalgia is complicated. In fact, this home, as the Odyssey teaches us, amongst other things, may no longer be the one we left behind. We return and find it different; perhaps we have undertaken a long journey only to realise we have fallen victim to a nostalgic delusion. Such are the downsides of nostalgia.

On the other hand, that nostalgia is also a form of dissatisfaction with the present; this does not mean that we need to return to the woods, but simply that we must recognise that the present and the world are cruel places.

Resolving this contradiction is no simple matter. If you simply compress this dual exposure – these two stubborn and opposing directions, the past and the present, dreams and everyday life – nostalgia loses all its charm. It must be said – as philologists explain – that, despite its Greek origins, the word ‘nostalgia’ did not originate in ancient Greece. Here we can already glimpse a comical paradox. When we talk about nostalgia, we are nostalgic for a nostalgically Greek word. Yes, because the word was coined by a Swiss man, Johannes Hofer, for one of his medical dissertations, way back in 1688. Our doctor had also suggested, to analyse this state of mind, ‘monomania’ and ‘philopatridomania’ (I really like ‘monomania’, whilst I can’t even pronounce the other word). In any case, by the end of the seventeenth century, nostalgia was considered an illness. The remedies left much to be desired, as it was believed that opium, leeches and a trip to the Swiss Alps would cure the symptoms of nostalgia. Apart from the leeches, the other two have become nostalgic symbols: opium takes you back to the womb, and the trip to the Swiss Alps provided the inspiration for "Heidi". Which – just to mention something from my past, a bit sad and a bit funny – during my animal husbandry exam I accidentally said ‘Mucca’ instead of ‘Vacca’, and the professor first gave me a lecture about how Heidi had ruined a generation of animal husbandry specialists, philosophers and intellectuals, all prey to the naturalistic fallacy, and then failed me in my exam record.

We subsequently made small strides in defining nostalgia. By the end of the 18th century, doctors had discovered that returning home did not always cure the symptoms of nostalgia. But as we were saying, nostalgia is complex. Over time, nostalgia came to be seen as a disease of the modern age. And this brings us back to our topic.

Let’s examine the dangers of this complex and problematic sentiment. First of all, it is detached from reality. The fond memories of grandmothers of yesteryear, of shady, welcoming woods, and the memories of those who produced handmade silk with flowers woven into the fabrics, are precisely that: memories – and therefore idealised versions of the past. If we were to take a close look at my grandparents’ lives with a bit of goodwill, I’m sure no influencer would have much to write home about. Wake up at 4 am, walk to the fields, work with your hands, return at sunset, collect the children from their various nannies, prepare dinner, tend to the livestock, and then off to bed – because tomorrow at 4 am it starts all over again. That’s how their whole life went – forget about ‘granny-maxxing’. Incidentally, grandmothers learnt to cook when the food industry took off, that is, right in the middle of the economic boom. They started then because there was finally a bit more to eat and they could indulge in fancy recipes, given that their children were working in the service sector and bringing home a decent salary. In short, by idealising the past, nostalgia channels dissatisfaction with the present into a project to recreate an imaginary past.

Then there is the problem of a shift in nostalgic sentiment. Human history is full of these slips back into the past of the past. Speaking of weavers, over a century ago, disgusted by the factories and run-down neighbourhoods created by mechanical looms, John Ruskin and William Morris looked to an even more distant past – to a time before there were even weavers weaving flowers and silk – in order to trace their roots back to something even older: the medieval craftsman. There, they found the dream of a truly skilled trade.

Plato has been discussed far and wide. In the dialogue "Phaedrus", his Socrates could not stand written texts. He regarded them as static, whereas conversation requires speakers to be flexible, answering questions and adapting to their interlocutors. Plato considers this capacity for adaptation a hallmark of wisdom. True understanding arises through a flexible and reciprocal exchange. Reliance on writing threatens this balance: it produces nothing but the illusion of knowledge. What would we say today about this view? We who complain that people no longer read, and therefore fail to experience complex thought (which a good book should contain), and who are exasperated by the endless chatter on talk shows?

In response to the tales of former managers who have returned home and rediscovered themselves, one might say that modernity, for a variety of reasons, has spared us the task of slaying 114 suitors, as Odysseus had to do; otherwise, he would not have been able to return home without a massacre. The slaughter is a symbol: of combat, of hardship, a bloodbath – in short, a war. Instead, today we have a system that protects us and even allows us to live in the woods whilst receiving an excellent severance package. But this is a form of nostalgia reserved for the few.

Speaking of ‘few’, perhaps that is the crux of the matter. There are few recorded instances of violence from the Palaeolithic period. The archaeologist Alfredo Gonzales-Ruibal explains this, noting that for much of the Neolithic period, there were no proper weapons of war. The arrows used for hunting were the same as those used for fighting and killing. Similarly, the massacres that took place during the period known as the Linear Pottery Culture were carried out using the same tools that were used to chop firewood or cultivate the land. It all began when, with the advent of domestication, farmers started living in fortified villages with moats (up to two metres deep) and palisades (often featuring gates with complex defensive structures). These defence systems naturally served to protect the villages from communities of hunters (who had, wisely, not yet opted for agriculture), with whom relations, it seems, were far from idyllic. However, based on the archaeological evidence available, it is now hypothesised that the rate of violence began to soar a millennium later, when farmers decided, of their own accord, to wage war against one another. Evidence of this surge can be found in numerous mass graves, where the bodies of men, women and children have been found jumbled together. Why did the farmers wage war against one another? The prevailing hypothesis is: because of hunger. I can believe that; whilst we were hunters and gatherers, there were very few of us on Earth. Optimistic estimates put the figure at 10 million; more realistic ones at 4–5 million people. There was enough food for everyone, until the hunter-gatherers decided to take up farming (partly because they were so skilled at hunting that they wiped out all the megafauna). And that’s when the problems began: on the one hand, we formed structured communities; on the other, we fought against other communities. Essentially, when we yearn for the woods and farms of the past, we fail to consider that if everyone in my block of flats were to move in next to the ‘forest family’, within a week we’d start fighting over resources. Nostalgia for that past is felt by few, and in coming to terms with this sentiment, we cannot ignore this fact.

Nostalgia has a political dimension that was highlighted, at the time, by the philosopher Svetlana Boym, who wrote a fine book, "The Future of Nostalgia" (2001), in which, ahead of her time, she asked whether our longing for a lost era of skilled labour would turn into technophobia, a distrust of social change and a desire to return to the world as it once was. And what are the political implications lurking behind our desire for artisanal, naturally leavened bread and handmade ceramics? Ultimately, she wrote that uncritical nostalgia “gives rise to monsters such as nationalism, racial supremacy and fascism”.

Why? Because from Karl Marx (there are three chapters in his "Capital" in which he describes in detail the transition from handcrafted objects to industrially manufactured products) to Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau and right up to Heidegger (his examples of poetic life are steeped in symbolism and nostalgia: the woodcutter, the windmill, the farmer, the rushing River Rhine) and the many intellectuals today who are concerned about technology, the recurring arguments all revolve around the same theme: there is a moral imperative to cultivate skills. If we do not learn them, we are free neither to understand the world nor to set it right. But here too, nostalgia forces us into a partial view: Socrates dismisses the new technology – namely the book – by listing only its costs. Marx and others idealise the craftsman; the workshop, they say, is a place of integrated human development, yet at the same time they underestimate the social inequalities that often underpinned artisanal production. These arguments are therefore based on a recurring pattern. When past eras of specialised practices are regarded as more fully human, the social order that produced them can easily appear superior to the one that replaced them. The past, therefore, seems superior to the present. This is why – according to Svetlana Boym – these arguments risk becoming reactionary. When we lament the disappearance of certain skills, we might also – if we are not very careful – end up regretting the loss of the social structures that surrounded them. This shift is the fundamental mechanism through which nostalgia for skills fuels a longing for a world now past, and we end up among the nostalgics tout court – those who say ‘there used to be no immigrants’ or ‘trains used to run on time’.

A recent example of nostalgia for skilled labour? In September 2025, the US Department of Labour published a photograph of a white man in a denim shirt with a dimpled chin, set against a blue sky dotted with imposing cranes. The slogan: ‘Let’s make America skilled again!’. At best, the image promotes the Fordist compromise of hard work in exchange for a decent wage. At worst, it echoes National Socialist posters promoting a policy of white supremacy, associating the white worker with state power.

But will all this complex reasoning, full of references, prevent me tomorrow from looking with satisfaction and curiosity upon a manual occupation and a way of life that take me away from the alienating and stressful modern working conditions? I really don’t think so. Because it is also true that nostalgia makes one optimistic, fosters a sense of belonging and builds confidence in one’s own abilities. And besides, we’re all inclined to reminisce (even if we don’t achieve the same result as Proust) and, when we do (unlike Proust), we tend to emphasise the positive aspects and gloss over the things that don’t quite add up. After all, the world is rather complicated (there are so many of us) and we’re all looking for a foothold, a beacon in the chaos. And whether these are memories of the 1980s or the Middle Ages matters little. Nostalgia is ambiguous. You might start a war because you’re nostalgic for the Soviet Empire, but you might also resist a dictator because you remember when, in a Ukrainian village, the women spun wool and told stories of freedom from the invader.

How do we get out of this? I find myself nostalgic for the scientific method, now fallen into disuse. Because culture and learning progress through trial and error, shipwrecks and safe harbours. It is useful to have a tool that highlights the gap between our dreams and reality, between what we express with impunity, convinced we are right, and the litmus test by which we put our ideas to the test: it is a great journey towards Ithaca. Furthermore, the scientific method promotes innovation, which may well be frowned upon by some technophobes, but offers a tangible hope of producing more bread. Because it is clear that producing more bread (and making it better than our grandparents did) means (both symbolically and in practice) having more time to attend to human affairs – so complex, so unique – and to seek an acceptable compromise so that we may bring our journey to a fitting conclusion. And then, innovating in bread-making means bringing more peace – to cities, to the woods, to factories, to workshops, and between the old and the young. Let us give hope to the Odysseuses – both those we once were and those we shall become.