But gluing words together without explicit connections is common pretty much everywhere. Compare Greek, which freely forms adjectives that way, or Latin sanguisuga "bloodsuck[er]" (leech) or lucifer "light-bear[er]" (light-bearer).
There are cases like noun+noun but they are rare and they are not productive, i.e. I cannot make one up. Pescecane (fish dog, i.e. a shark) is ok, but you cannot "sferaneve" for a snowball
Probably the reason is that the two nouns have to have a special relation for it to work, i.e. one word has to act as an adjective, it has to qualify the first word somehow. The shark is a fish, but is a fish that bites like a dog, hence it's a fishdog a pescecane. Similarly "casa madre", for headquarters, it's not a house of the mother ("case della madre") but it's a special kind of house that has the quality of "gatherhing the whole family together like if in the case of a real family"
"Sfera di neve" doesn't like a word whole "snow globe" does and indeed some write it as "snowglobe"