Since Anne Maike has lived in Italy, her attitude to cooking has changed. In particular pasta She liked it: For a total of 2,700 euros, the theater director learned to make four to five different types of pieces by hand in an intensive course at the Scuola di Arte Culinaria Cordon Bleu. Since then, her everyday life has changed a lot, as Anne Maike told the Dutch newspaper “De Telegraph” told.

Making pasta as a hobby: Anne spends 400 euros per month

“Italian life has further fueled the ‘pasta nerd’ in me,” she says herself. She loves to find her way through it different regions of Italy to cook and explore their differences. She now has a considerable collection of tools in her kitchen, from a brass ravioli cutter costing 35 euros, a handmade gnocchetti plate and a “guitarra”, a guitar-like device for cutting dough into long strings.

Anne can hardly imagine life without pasta: “The best thing about this hobby is that it costs almost nothing and I can do it almost every day because you have to eat anyway.” Although she spends around 400 euros a month on her family of three plus friends who stop by regularly, it still doesn’t feel like an expensive hobby.

Anne hopes to one day be able to turn her passion into a career. “I hope one day to be able to combine the pasta knowledge and experience I have now with that of my Italian neighbor and give workshops together,” she tells De Telefgraaf.

Italy’s love of pasta and the comeback of cooking

Anne’s hobby fits her new home, like the portal “Italian food” explains: In Italy, people eat an average of 23.3 kilograms pasta per capita per year, more than any other country in the world. Of 17 million tons of global production, Italy contributed 4.2 tons in 2024, almost a quarter of the total. For the locals, their dishes are also seen as a source of identity: for 96.6 percent of those surveyed, pasta conveys national pride.

But cooking in general is also experiencing a bit of a revival: During the pandemic, many people rediscovered making things themselves. An analysis of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology among 5,000 consumers in ten European countries shows: 36 percent enjoyed cooking more during the lockdown. 27 percent wanted to spend more time on home-cooked meals even after the pandemic.