Why did Italian cuisine react less strongly to nouvelle cuisine?

Italian cuisine experienced a significantly weaker reaction to the nouvelle cuisine movement compared to other culinary traditions. This was primarily because Italian gastronomy has historically been highly regional and lacked a centralized set of rigid standards or "oppressive" rules—such as those found in French grande cuisine—against which the nouvelle movement was designed to rebel.1

While nouvelle cuisine emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction against the calorie-laden extravagances and technical constraints of classic French cooking, Italian food remained deeply rooted in its diverse regional traditions, local geography, and long-standing social customs. Because there was no equivalent to the formal, codified structure of la grande cuisine to dismantle, the nouvelle revolution found little fertile ground to take hold within Italy.213