Strega Nona turns 50 — and her art lives in Minneapolis
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In her office overlooking the Mississippi River, Lisa Von Drasek pulls one watercolor painting after another out of a big flat box.
The pastel scenes feature blue pumpkins and blue rolling hills, a plump rabbit, lots of spaghetti and a roly-poly grandmother figure with her signature headscarf, apron and cauldron.
It’s Strega Nona, a beloved witch from children’s literature.
“This is pen and ink and watercolor and a little pencil crayon. You see? Look at her dancing,” says Von Drasek, the curator of the Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature at the University of Minnesota.
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The watercolors are the original illustrations for the children’s picture book about the witch, “Strega Nona, An Old Tale,” which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
A Minnesota home for a global classic
In 1975, author and illustrator Tomie dePaola penned the book about the Italian “grandmother witch,” her young dopey apprentice Big Anthony and her magic pasta pot, which, if not used carefully, can release a flood of spaghetti that overtakes their Calabrian village.
DePaola won the American Library Association’s Caldecott Honor Award for it in 1976 and would go on to write a whole series of “Strega Nona” books.
Von Drasek opens an old copy of the book to the title page, where there is a doodle of Strega Nona with a handwritten note from dePaola, dated 1977.
“For the Kerlan Collection, with love and three kisses,” Van Drasek says. “Any time Tomie signed anything, he put a little heart.”
While dePaola, who died in 2020, was based on the East Coast, he gave dozens of manuscripts and illustrations for more than 160 books to the Kerlan Collection.
Von Drasek says his connection to the University of Minnesota was a friendship with her predecessor, fellow children’s literature expert Karen Nelson Hoyle, and to the children’s literature department.
Von Drasek says dePaola visited Minnesota frequently and would hold seminars. (He also spent weeks in the 1980s and 90s consulting with the Children’s Theater in Minneapolis for several productions of “Strega Nona.”)
“He wanted us to have these because we're open access,” Von Drasek explains, which means anyone can make an appointment with the collection and examine the letters and illustrations directly.
“I have classes with 8-year-olds. I have classes with graduate students. I have classes from MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design), and I have classes from Hamline University's children's writing and, of course, University of Minnesota classes,” Von Drasek says.
“All of them have the opportunity to hold these materials in their hands and say, ‘Oh, a human being did this.’”
The man behind the magic
Even though dePaola worked on hundreds of books, he always said Strega Nona was his favorite character.
“She’s a charming character and I’m even amazed by her. She strikes a chord in everyone. You don’t have to be Italian to love her,” dePaola said in a 2015 interview with the City University of New York. “She’s a wise woman, but there’s a little magic in her.”
Von Drasek, who was a school librarian in New York before moving to Minnesota, was also friends with dePaola. DePaola would come by her library whenever he had a new book out. She says he shared many traits with Strega Nona — kindness, compassion, patience.
“I never saw him impatient with a child, with a parent, with a teacher who would have a stack of books for him to sign, and every book he signed ... he would draw a little picture,” Von Drasek says. “He exuded kindness.”
The cozy spell never broke
Half a century later, Strega Nona’s warmth endures, finding new audiences. In 2024, the pasta witch even became a TikTok trend — “Strega Nona Fall” — for embodying the coziness of autumn, which was then followed by a trend of Strega Nona Halloween costumes.
Strega Nona is one of many retellings of the Magic Porridge Pot trope from folk and fairy tales, such as “Sweet Porridge” from The Brothers Grimm. Von Drasek says Strega Nona has become the most famous.
“The story is a classic one, a familiar one of people in need being taken care of, and what is a bigger need than hunger and the fact that there is an older woman who has magic and can conjure food for an entire village. That is not only a classic tale, but it's a comfort tale,” Von Drasek says.
“These stories that we hear over and over and over again are retold by many writers and illustrators, but the ones that endure are the ones that bring love.”
“Why ‘Strega Nona’?” Von Drasek adds. “It's a picture book that's like a hug.”
Correction (Nov. 5, 2025) : An earlier version of this story misnamed the award dePaola won in 1976.
