By the autumnal equinox, Danni Capalbo had already had her fall game plan in place for weeks. She would spend the coming months wrapped in cozy layers in her apartment in Boston, stirring up steaming vats of carbohydrates.

Her inspiration for the season is a benevolent witch she met in the hills of Calabria, Italy, many years ago: Strega Nona, the title character of a 1975 children’s book of the same name by Tomie dePaola.

“She’s so relatable,” Capalbo, 28, said. “She’s a little Italian witch who makes pasta all the time.”

She first encountered the character in her childhood library. But lately she has been seeing Strega Nona pop up on social media, recast by adults as a patron saint of autumnal nostalgia.

She joined in by posting a tribute to the character that has been viewed more than 300,000 times on TikTok. Other fans joked that they were trading the chaos of “brat summer” for a more wholesome “Strega Nona fall.”

“Strega Nona core is very much my vibe for 2024, being old in spirit and hunched over a pot,” Caroline Goldfarb, a writer and co-founder of a tinned-fish company, said in an interview with Grub Street in January.

If these posts are an outgrowth of the online habit of branding every season, they also represent an enduring fascination with a character known for her quiet way of life and gently administered lessons — not exactly the typical recipe for internet fame.

Strega Nona, whose name means “Grandmother Witch,” is a healer who enchants the townspeople with her magically refilling pasta pot. When she recruits the help of a young man named Big Anthony, he bungles the spell that is supposed to halt pasta-making. The town overflows with noodles.

What about this story has bewitched fans well into adulthood?

Margaret Duncan, 29, a health care worker in Boston, finds herself reaching for characters like Strega Nona every autumn, when her nostalgia swells with the back-to-school season.

“I think that there’s a longing for simplicity,” she said. “Her biggest problem is that this young man who helps her made too much pasta.”

Even that problem Strega Nona is able to solve: She hands Big Anthony a fork and tells him to start eating.

The illustrations in the book, also by dePaola, feature the rich colors of the Italian countryside, replete with terra cotta shingles, jewel-tone peacocks and curling tendrils of pasta that extend across page breaks.

Capalbo said the book conjured a certain snug atmosphere that was welcome as she hunkers down for colder weather. The character’s witchiness, she added, is also a nice prelude to Halloween.

“Everyone has their big fun summer,” she said. “Now you just want to be cozy and make pasta from your magic pasta pot.”

“Strega Nona” is dePaola’s retelling of a German folktale, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The book earned him the Caldecott Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in children’s literature, and yielded more than a dozen follow-ups including “Strega Nona Does It Again” and “Strega Nona Takes a Vacation.”

It also became the subject of book bans, according to The New Yorker, for its portrayal of witchcraft. (Writing for the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, one scholar argued in 2019 that Strega Nona’s powers, which included soothing headaches and curing warts, seemed rather benign to warrant a ban.)

DePaola died in 2020, at 85. His longtime assistant, Bob Hechtel, said it was bittersweet that the author had not lived long enough to see his story’s latest renaissance.

“I think he would have been completely thrilled that Strega Nona has in some way become a little bit of a cultural reference,” said Hechtel, 70, who now manages the author’s estate. “Tomie did not want to be forgotten.”

The character has already cycled back into popular culture in unexpected ways. Strega Nona inspired a drug-infused stew in a 2015 episode of the show “Broad City.” Last year, when 15 wheelbarrow loads of pasta were dumped in a forest in Old Bridge, New Jersey, many an online sleuth blamed Strega Nona.

Some of her fans seem to take a certain glee in remixing the children’s book character with more mature themes.

Julianna Tracey, 24, who lives in western New York, dressed up for a recent Halloween as “Sexy Strega Nona.” She wore a bonnet made from a cream-colored pillowcase and a pair of fishnets.

Perhaps that juxtaposition of childhood and adulthood is why picture-book characters so often become meme fodder. Another recent example: Frog and Toad, the Arnold Lobel characters that resurged online thanks to a dedicated page on Reddit in 2017. Krisha Mendoza, 41, a first grade teacher in Delano, California, has been teaching her students about Frog and Toad’s friendship. She plans to bring them into Strega Nona’s mystical, noodle-filled world once the weather gets cooler.

“I’m going to bring her back for this generation,” Mendoza said. “Her never-ending pasta needs to be remembered.”