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PART TWO: IDENTITIES, BORDERS, AND MEDIATIONS

American Media and the Taste for Italy: Placing the Construction of Italian Food Identity in a Transatlantic Setting, 1970s–2020s1

Giulia Crisanti

Abstract

The article examines the constant interplay between Americanizing and Italianizing dynamics that have shaped transnational representations of Italian identity and food culture. Building on the existing literature on the mutual influences between Italy and the U.S., my contribution explores how American media and Italian American cultural mediators—from Marcella Hazan to Stanley Tucci—have shaped a popular narrative that portrays Italian food culture as the gateway to an idealized lifestyle centered on values such as authenticity, tradition, and regionality. To this end, the article intertwines Italy’s food history with the analysis of some of the socio-cultural and economic developments that have affected Italian and American mediascapes from the 1970s to the present. These include both the “fast-foodization” of Italian and Italian American foodways, as well as the Americanization of Italy’s mediascapes. At the same time, the growing presence of Italy-centered food content across American media has provided platforms, contexts, and instruments allowing for a greater transfer of Italian cultural items and ways to the U.S. What ultimately emerges is not only the transatlantic development of a gastronomic Italian identity, but also the need to rethink notions of Americanization and Italianization as mutually involving processes of cross-cultural contamination.

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1. Introduction

  • 1 Unless otherwise specified, all translations from Italian to English are mine.

1It’s in the field of gastronomy above all that Italy, including its diplomatic network, has best demonstrated the intangible creative potential of this country. The world presence of Italian cuisine has created stories, indicated new standards and given prominence to personalities that nations everywhere have wished to emulate—in restaurants, on TV, on social media and in the home. (Ellwood, “Italy: Soft Power Superpower?”)

I’m tired of watching people go to Italy[.] I can’t help but feel a little Italy-ed out in recent years, like I’ve hit my capacity for watching clips of cheesemaking or people eating perfectly crisped Neapolitan pizza. (And that doesn’t even include Italy’s dominance over fictional food-adjacent shows … .) …. It’s as though major networks, wanting a guaranteed hit, see the success of all this Italy-centric TV and think, great, let’s do that again[.]” (Makalintal)

2While seemingly at odds, these declarations—which are distanced by only a few months—point to a series of shared presumptions: that the prestige and presence of Italian food is everywhere (and especially in the U.S.) represented, even to the point of becoming overwhelming; that food plays a major role in Italy’s soft power and international image; and that such an image revolves around a series of recurrent canonized notions popularized through the media.

3To be fair, neither the development of effective gastrodiplomatic initiatives nor global culinary prestige is exclusive to Italy. In an ever-more interconnected and globalizing world, the search for authentic, sustainable, and locally-rooted food has underpinned the international promotion of several cuisines by countries that, just as much as Italy, have purposely turned their gastronomic culture into a source of diplomacy, from France to Thailand or China (Parasecoli; Rockower; Ranta). It is, however, undeniable that food holds a significant role in shaping public perceptions of and fascination with Italy. In welcoming Italy’s inclusion in the top-ten ranking of the Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index 2023, the director of the Italian Trade Agency (ITA) expectedly foregrounded the food element, noticing that “as a nation brand, Italy is perceived as a country with strong affiliations with its ancient culinary culture that has continuously inspired gastronomical trends around the world” (Sacchi).

4Sociologists and historians have repeatedly emphasized that the production and consumption of food are everywhere charged with a wide set of cultural meanings defining people’s social, ethnic, cultural, and religious identities (Bourdieu; Mennell; Gabaccia; Watson and Caldwell). This understanding of food as a constituent of individual and collective identities rests on its value as—in Roland Barthes’ famous formulation—“a system of communication,” comprising images, usages, and behaviors broadly expressed and popularized through public media. In this regard, scholars like Fabio Parasecoli and Isabelle de Sollier have effectively argued how addressing foodways as cultural signifiers requires looking into food media “such as television, cooking shows, food blogs and cookbooks” (3) and their fundamental role in shaping identity narratives centered on the association between a community’s food and a specific set of cultural values and social practices. Consistently, historians and media experts have underscored the role of Italy’s media system in codifying a textual and visual vocabulary to represent the country’s gastronomic culture, from Letizia Bindi’s analysis of programs like A come Agricoltura (2007) to the more recent investigation conducted within the research project “GOLA: Representation of gastronomic culture, nutrition and food in the Italian media system (1954–1990).”

5As David Ellwood underscored, it is not just that “Italy has always had a foodie air about its image in the world”: food has represented (perhaps) the essential element in building a narrative of Italian identity both nationally and internationally. Food’s relevance to sustaining Italy’s nation-branding strategies cannot be understood without considering the centrality of food in the country’s nation-building process and the ensuing codification of a specific set of values that have come to define its gastronomic culture. This centrality is confirmed in the extensive literature dedicated to tracing the “culinary way to Italian identity,” including the studies by Massimo Montanari and Andrea Capatti, Emanuela Scarpellini, and John Dickie. Scholars like Roberta Sassatelli, Fabio Parasecoli, and Peter Naccarato have also envisioned food as a central identifier of Italianness in a global context, examining its implications “in the cultural representation of Italy both at home and abroad” (Sassatelli 3). Moreover, Italians’ emotional and historical attachment to their foodways is so deeply ingrained in people’s common sense that it is recurrently thought of as timeless.

6However, neither the concept of a unique Italian gastronomic culture nor the definition of specific characteristics that add to its global prestige has been ever-present. They rather constitute a recent postwar development that owes much—I argue—to modern media and mediators operating across a transatlantic—Italian and American—space of action. Starting from the 1970s, the global rehabilitation of Italian cuisine has relied on its public representation in international media, primarily targeting American audiences (Parasecoli). It follows the need to frame the emergence of a public discourse representing Italianness through food within broader socio-economic processes that invested the mediascapes and food cultures of both Italy and the U.S., intertwining Americanizing and Italianizing dynamics. My work thus adds to the call made by historians of Italy-U.S. relations to consider the history of Italian cuisine from a transatlantic perspective.

7Besides the commonly acknowledged American invention of the Mediterranean Diet myth (Moro), studies on Italian migration to the U.S. have also investigated the American origins of Italy’s national cuisine. On the one hand, scholars such as Simone Cinotto, Hasia Diner, Maryann Tebben, and Federico Chiaricati have highlighted food’s key role in defining Italian Americans’ cultural identity. In the U.S., Italian migrants overcame regional culinary fractures to build a cohesive national identity and cuisine. On the other hand, food also became a significant tool for them to negotiate between their ethnic identity and their gradual integration into American society. The latter went together with American consumers’ growing interest in Italian foodways. As early as 1916, an American guidebook to “The real New York” invited readers to have a whole experience of the city by venturing into its Little Italy, where they could “enjoy the spectacles of Italians performing Italianness” (Hoganson 244). In the following century, the gradual emergence of a canonized way to represent Italy’s gastronomic culture unraveled—I contend—through a changing and yet constant interaction between Italian and American food cultures and media.

8This article builds on the existing literature on the mutual influences between Italy and the U.S. to examine how American media and Italian American cultural mediators have shaped a popular narrative that portrays Italian food culture as the gateway to an idealized lifestyle centered on values such as authenticity, tradition, and regionality. I will do so by intertwining Italy’s food history with the analysis of some of the socio-cultural and economic developments that have affected Italian and American mediascapes from the 1970s to the present. I will thus consider how the emergence of a public discourse linking Italianness to food originated as a response to similar trends in Italy and the U.S. The increasing industrialization of the food sector, the growth of the retailing sector, the spread, through the media, of new consumer cultures, and the advent of fast food were all perceived, in the course of the 1970s and 1980s, as threatening to Americanize/homogenize Italian food culture. Whether in reaction to the perceived Americanization of Italian media cultures and culinary habits or to the fast-foodization of Italian American foodways, it followed—on both sides of the Atlantic—the stimulus to re-discover and re-launch Italian gastronomic authenticity. The ensuing transnational popularization of a narrative characterizing Italian cuisine as locally and historically rooted owes much to a series of key Italian American figures: what Simone Cinotto has called “immigrant tastemakers.” These operated as cultural mediators, codifying an idealized representation of Italian food and thus contributing to its growing popularity in the U.S. The result has been an ever-growing presence of food-related Italian content across American media. This has found the best and most recent expression—I argue—in Stanley Tucci’s cross-mediatic representation of Italy and its food culture in a series of books, movies, and TV shows.

9Overall, I aspire to uncover the constant interplay between Americanizing and Italianizing dynamics that have shaped transnational representations of Italian identity and food culture. Consistently, my analysis will move back and forth between Italy and the U.S., investigating the many “selective appropriations”—to borrow Rob Kroes’ famous expression—to which American and Italian models were subject and considering instances of mutual influence and cultural contamination. On the one hand, American media and food paradigms have significantly influenced Italian foodways and mediascapes; on the other hand, the growing presence of Italy-centered food content across American media has provided platforms, contexts, and instruments that allow for a greater transfer of Italian cultural items and ways to the US.

2. Italian Fast Food

10Food has been a significant element in Italy’s nation-building process. The discovery and mapping of Italy’s many local recipes and regional foodways participated in the effort to “make the Italians,” which was carried out after the country’s unification in 1861 (Montanari). It was, however, only after World War II that a national cuisine began to gradually take shape, thanks to the development of large-scale distribution, communication and transportation networks, as well as the introduction of industrial food production techniques. The nationalization of the Italian food market proceeded at a slow pace, though. It was not until the 1980s that a common Italian diet began to take form (Capatti et al.). In this context, the definition of a distinctively Italian culinary identity was related to broader socio-economic and cultural developments that were perceived as Americanizing Italian society, first and foremost, the advent of new food and media cultures.

  • 2 The privatization of Italian TV began in the mid-1970s following a series of rulings by Italy’s Con (...)

11The spread of a nationally uniform Italian diet rested on innovation in retailing and advertising, including the postwar gradual spread of American-imported supermarkets (De Grazia; Scarpellini), as well as new marketing strategies to sell pre-packaged food products nationally. Although the majority of the Italian population continued to rely on local food stores throughout the postwar era, by the 1980s, the “supermarketisation” (Iocco et al.; Corrado) of Italian agriculture was clearly in place. This was part of a broader retail-driven restructuring of Italy’s food industry, which further contributed to the integration of Italian food companies into larger multinational groups (Fonte and Cucco), and thus to the growing detachment of food products from their territory of origin. This transformation of Italy’s food landscape must be linked to two interconnected and seemingly Americanizing developments: on the one hand, the privatization of Italian television and, on the other, the spread of a new fast food culture. In his study on the privatization of Italian broadcasting during the 1980s, Giuseppe Richeri effectively uncovered its relation to the growth of Italy’s large-scale retailing sector, including the expansion of supermarkets. The increasing need to guide consumers’ choices fueled growing investments in TV advertising, thus sustaining the progressive commercialization of Italian television.2 At the same time, the advent of a new “private television culture” (Sangiovanni) must be connected to a renewed enthusiasm for Americana. The liberalization of Italian broadcasting prompted an unprecedented invasion of American TV products and paradigms: not only did American television exports to Italy fundamentally surge (Barra), but the commercial reorganization of Italian TV networks was interpreted as a shift from the BBC model to an “American way of television” (Bettetini). It followed a growing presence of American cultural imageries invading Italian popular imagination through television screens. This did not simply equate to the increasing import of American ready-made products like Happy Days or Dallas, but more importantly implied the reorganization of Italian TV scheduling around advertising rationales aimed at addressing specific consumer target groups (Fasce; Scaglioni).

12Mixing American inspirations and advertising exigencies, the new Italian television of the 1980s had—in Umberto Eco’s words—a new “jazz-like rhythm” (Scalfari; Eco 202). Programs like Drive In, aired on Berlusconi’s network “Italia 1” from 1983 to 1988, exemplified this. The variety show featured comic sketches parodying famous Italian cultural figures of the time, including fast food enthusiasts, the so-called paninari (“sandwichees”). This youth movement, centered in Milan, was primarily composed of upper-middle-class teenagers who eagerly embraced American consumer culture (Crisanti; Morando). Amid Italy’s second economic miracle, Drive In became the epitome of the new American rhythm of Italian TV, as well as of new imaginaries and cultural habits channeled through television, especially the rise of fast food culture among younger generations. Luca Vercelloni effectively pointed out the intersection between these two developments, noticing the “exemplary harmony” between the “immediate satisfaction” guaranteed by modern fast food products and the dedication to “light entertainment” (966–967) in commercial TV, whose images fed the desirability of an American universe revolving around fast food.

13In this context, the reorganization of both Italy’s food industry and mediascape, alongside the spread of new American-inspired consumer imaginaries added to broader socio-economic developments, creating fertile ground for a growing fast food market in the country. In particular, the growth of Italy’s service sector, the introduction of Italian legislation on part-time labor, and greater youth and gender emancipation contributed to enlarging the number of people seeking sites for extra-domestic food consumption (Zamagni 196). The first Italian (but American-inspired) fast food chain, Burghy, opened in Milan in 1982. By the mid-decade, there were over eighty fast food outlets throughout Northern and Central Italy. The public press hailed them as “a sign of the changing times,” a new food trend suiting a new kind of society where “people live in a hurry and eat in a hurry” (Bartolini; D’Entreves; Salvadori; Beltrame; “La grande distribuzione”). It was not, however, until the (in)famous opening of the first McDonald’s in Rome, in March 1986, that fast food triggered a broad public debate, raising protests against its potential impact on Italian food culture (Resca and Gianola; “Assalto al «fast food»”; Della Rovere; Forti; Greco).

  • 3 Lodovico Gasparini, dir., Italian Fast Food, 1986, Columbia Pictures Italia.

14The arrival of Ray Kroc’s Golden Arches in Italy seemed to sanction a new era of excitement for Americana, especially among younger generations. When questioned about their motivations for eating at McDonald’s, many young visitors replied, “We like Americana” (Lampugnani). As Drive in’s “fast food girls” and paninari widely populated the Italian media landscape and public imagination, many commentators depicted fast food as “the tangible realization of the American dream of many Italians” (Rota). Alongside enthusiasm, however, came also resistance. On the day of the McDonald’s inauguration, the crowd enjoying the “americanate” (American things) was paralleled by a hostile crowd, comprised of local restaurant owners, political activists, trade unionists, actors, and singers (Forti, “McDonald’s”; Resca and Gianola), all claiming that they could not “allow a section of Rome, the showcase of Made in Italy, to be offended by a horde of paninari” (Lampugnani, McDonald’s). A dive into the public press of the time shows how the problem seemed to be greater than just the “fast food invasion; it rather revolved around its “Americanizing” effect (“Se non cambia sede McDonald’s chiuderà”). This combination of enthusiasm and concerns about the potential Americanization of Italian food customs echoed the similarly mixed reactions that characterized Italians’ responses to the postwar invasion of American consumer products. After the war, Alberto Sordi’s American in Rome had been the satirical symbol of “Italy’s fixation with all things Uncle Sam,” as well as of the limits of the Italian fondness for American consumer culture (Dickie). Now, the America-mania of his direct heir, the 1980s paninaro, was no less destined to crumble down in front of macaroni. In the final scene of the Drive In-inspired movie Italian Fast Food (written by the Vanzina brothers in 1986), the iconic paninaro (played by actor Enzo Braschi) eventually throws away his hamburger and fries to bite into a dish of spaghetti al dente.3

15It is thus no surprise that, despite the initial excitement, McDonald’s conquest of Italians’ stomachs proved troubled and slow. Three years after its arrival, the American chain had opened just four restaurants in Italy. The Golden Arches especially faced Italians’ resistance to changes in their foodways, which quickly rose to cultural strongholds against the invasion of Americana (Crisanti). To face such difficulties, its executives were compelled to progressively Italianize the fast food chain, adapting its offer to suit local tastes better. At the same time, a growing number of Italian fast food chains adapted McDonald’s fast food formula in their attempt to combine “the need for a quick meal with that of not losing Italian taste for quality food” (Enriotti). The reclaimed goal was to establish an Italian alternative to fast food. Such calls for a “fast cibus,” combining rapid service with the employment of Italian food products, were consistent with the beliefrecurrently expressed by the pressthat for fast food to go “from being a fad to being a habit,” it was necessary to Italianize it (Zanini).

  • 4 Camera di Commercio, Industria, Artigianato e Agricoltura di Milano – Archivio Storico, Faldone 149 (...)
  • 5 This tendency is echoed in the scholarly literature: the persistent localism of Italian food cultur (...)

16This dual success of and resistance to fast food strengthened a public urge to reassert the impermeability and superiority of Italy’s food culture. This was reflected in the gradual emergence of a public discourse portraying Italian gastronomy as a competitive counterpoint to American industrialized foods. On the one hand, even McDonald’s tended to blame its slow expansion on Italy’s “deeply rooted culinary culture, which goes badly with Anglo-Saxon eating habits” and which—according to the company’s board of directors—was largely satisfied by the wide availability of “snack bar combining the need for convenient fast food service with food that has a strong national imprint.”4 On the other hand, the spread of fast food encouraged a greater push to safeguard the culinary know-how of Italy’s local communities. It followed the tendency to emphasize the inherently regional character of Italian gastronomic heritage publicly.5

  • 6 The origin of Slow Food should also be addressed from a transatlantic perspective. This is not simp (...)

17Both the Italian food industry and the Italian State supported this regional representation due to its commercial and political profitability, thereby contributing to equating the consumption of Italian food with access to an authentically Italian lifestyle. The spread and canonization of this gastronomic imaginary sustained efforts to launch Italian food as a brand, both domestically and internationally. A notable example in this regard was the organization of Italy’s first food fair, “Cibus ’85,” in 1985. This was deliberately intended to internationally present Italy as the “Food Valley of the world” (Mondini; Sassatelli). The result was the so-called “turn-to-quality made in Italy consensus” (Brunori et al.): the rhetorical representation of Italian food culture as regional, tradition-based, and authentic gradually became hegemonic in the public discourse of politicians and mass media alike, constituting a crucial asset in turning made in Italy into a quality brand (Iocco et al.; Marino). Among the best expressions of this quality-centered response to American food paradigms was the creation of the Slow Food movement. This is an Italian-based international organization founded in 1986 in reaction to McDonald’s arrival; it has since been committed to safeguarding “the rich varieties and aromas of local cuisines” from the homogenization and impoverishment of tastes caused by fast food culture (Slow Food Manifesto).6 The spread of American fast food in Italy went hand in hand with the growing definition of a narrative on Italianness centered around the taste for genuine and regional foodways.

18At the same time, American consumers were becoming more familiar with and fascinated by Italian cuisine in response to the rise of industrialized fast food. In March 1987, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica significantly opposed the craze for fast food among Italian paninari, contrasting with the enthusiasm shown by the American public toward the initiatives in favor of Italian cuisine promoted in California by the Italian Trade Agency (“Alla scoperta dell’Italian food”). Even more so than through the initiatives of Italian public officials, it was, however, thanks to a series of American media outlets and Italian American cultural mediators that Italy’s equation with its quality food moved beyond Italian borders, creating an entry for “authentic” Italian food into American consumer culture.

2. “Italian American Tastemakers”7

  • 7 The notion is borrowed from Simone Cinotto (2017).

19Food played a central role in “making the Italians” also abroad, where it became the primary vehicle for Italian migrants to express their cultural distinctiveness and ties to the motherland. By mixing different regional traditions, Italian migrants in the U.S. fundamentally contributed to the development of an Italian national cuisine. On the one hand, first-generation Italian Americans often resisted the Americanization of their eating habits, maintaining their food preferences despite assimilation (Levenstein). On the other hand, Italian migrants’ progressive integration into American society paralleled that of their foods into the U.S. gastronomic landscape and food industry. Whereas second generations took a distance from their parents’ foodways as an inroad to their full integration into American society, Little Italy food destinations and early industrialized versions of Italian foods, such as Ettore Boiardi’s canned spaghetti, gained popularity among American consumers as early as the 1930s. However, it was only after World War II that the industrialization of Italian American food made it a “common item on the shelves of supermarkets across America,” while also endangering “its ability to proclaim a real sense of ethnic identity” (Cinotto 213).

  • 8 As seen, this kind of response was not so different from what would happen in Italy a decade later.

20Italian American food thus became nationally popular in its industrialized version, participating in the craze for ethnic-branded products that swept American society in the 1970s. In this regard, Donna Gabaccia has underscored how the U.S. fast food industry extensively leveraged the increasing popularity of ethnic food, turning products like pizza into icons of American multiethnic cuisine (170). By supplying mass-reproducible, pre-packaged, Italian-branded foods, the U.S. food industry fundamentally contributed to simultaneously standardizing and ethnicizing Italian American cuisine. Even before the Golden Arches reached the Italian peninsula, American chains like Pizza Hut or Totino’s set the tone for the fast-foodization of Italian cuisine in the U.S. The result was a growing tension between Americanized Italian food, on the one hand, and the re-claimed Italian culinary heritage of migrant communities on the other. By the 1970s, the combined industrialization, standardization, and national circulation of their foods created, among Italian Americans, a feeling of cultural loss, fueling efforts to rediscover their culinary traditions and re-assert standards of authenticity (Gabaccia; Tebben).8

  • 9 A later example of this re-discovering and codification of authentically Italian American cuisine i (...)

21Two kinds of responses followed. On the one hand, third-generation Italian Americans began re-establishing an attachment to Italian American foodways, which their parents had severed. The best example, in this regard, is Helen Barolini’s Umbertina, published in 1979. In her memoir, Barolini retraces the culinary traditions of her parents and grandparents to reconnect with her Italian American heritage and reclaim the value of her hyphenated culinary identity.9 On the other hand, a new postwar wave of Italian migrants reacted to the predominance of the “red sauce” Italian American cuisine by outspokenly taking distance from the diasporic food of Italian American communities in its popular industrial version (Albala). As underscored by Simone Cinotto, during the 1970s, this new group of Italian immigrants “helped reshape Italian food in America and across the Atlantic by relocating it within the ‘authentic’ traditions of Italian regional cooking” (67). To this end, they published commercial cookbooks, organized cooking classes, and hosted local and national TV shows dedicated to Italian food. Among the first to do so were Margaret and Gian Franco Romagnoli, authors of several best-selling cookbooks and hosts of the PBS TV series The Romagnolis’ Table in the 1970s. The show first aired in 1973 and was later credited by The New York Times for having “helped introduce Americans to authentic Italian home cooking … at a time when many Americans believed that spaghetti with meatballs was an Italian dish” (Grimes).

  • 10 Hazan’s contribution to shaping American society and culture has recently received official recogni (...)
  • 11 This re-habilitation of Italy’s image in the U.S. has recently been investigated within the interdi (...)

22The main protagonist of this re-awakened American interest in Italian food culture was, beyond doubt, Marcella Hazan, a postwar emigrée from Emilia Romagna, who is to this day considered to have “changed, thoroughly and irreversibly, the way Italian food is cooked, eaten and talked about in the United States” (Wells).10 Hazan first arrived in the US in 1955; in 1969, she started giving Italian cooking classes in New York. Three years later, she published her first cookbook, The Classic Italian Cookbook, claiming that “nothing significant exists under Italy’s sun that is not touched by art” and, hence, that Italian food too was “the product of two arts, the art of cooking and the art of eating.” Hazan’s representation of Italian cuisine tuned into a new image of Italian culture as stylish, beautiful, and modern, one that had been established over the previous decades through growing American appreciation of Italian films, fashion, and design.11 To the misrepresented Italianness embodied by Italian American foodways, Hazan opposed “real” Italian cuisine, underscoring how, in fact, “no single cuisine answers to that name,” given that “the cooking of Italy is really the cooking of regions that long antedate the Italian nation.” Her collection of typically Italian recipes made no concessions to American tastes and, more importantly, outspokenly dismantled common stereotypes of Italian food, shifting the focus from the southern cuisine of Italian Americans to the gastronomic traditions and products of northern Italy (Cinotto).

23In the subsequent decade, several other Italian American cook writers and restaurateurs followed her lead, including more or less famous figures like Giuliano Bugialli (who would host his PBS TV program, Bugialli’s Italy, in the 1990s), Anna Del Conte (author of Gastronomy in Italy), or Pino Luongo (owner of the restaurant “Cantinori” in New York and author of A Tuscan in the Kitchen). By the end of the 1980s, the buzz around Italy and its food was such that—a journalist noted—“1988 became the year of the Italians” (Jenkins). This ensemble of Italian American “tastemakers” positioned themselves not simply as cultural mediators but as actual authenticators of Italian food culture in the U.S. Despite variously focusing on the cuisines of different parts of Italy, they “all recognized the importance of regionalism in any discussion of the foods of Italy” (Jenkins). Their search for authenticity and their regional depiction of Italy’s gastronomic culture rested on their continuous movement back and forth between the two countries. As such, it must also be connected to the similar discursive trends that—as seen in the previous paragraph—characterized the public rhetoric around Italian food in Italy during the 1980s. It is only by considering the dialectic between the search for genuine Italian food and the rejection of industrial American(izing) foodways taking place on both sides of the Atlantic that we can have a complete understanding of the social and cultural dynamics that have shaped the development of a transnational discourse about food, Italians, and Italianness. This rested on the transatlantic circulation of cultural and culinary imaginaries between the two countries.

24The post-modern segmentation of the U.S. consumer market into lifestyle-oriented niches (Turow; Cohen), alongside the localizing pressures posed by the growing globalization of food markets (which also meant a surge in American food imports from Italy) further contributed to sanction the success of this narrative in the course of the 1990s. Already in 1993, The New York Times greeted the apparently ubiquitous appreciation of Italian cuisine, declaring “The world’s most popular cuisine? Hands down, it’s Italian, whether you’re dining in restaurants in Tokyo, in Cincinnati, at home in Paris or Rome. Italian food is familiar, easy to understand, easy to love” (Wells). In this context, every new opening of an Italian restaurant across the U.S. came to be presented as evidence of “the statewide mania for Italian food” (Brooks).

25In the subsequent years, a new generation of Italian American culinary writers and TV hosts emerged, reproducing a—by then well-established—narrative to discuss and perform Italianness through food. Whether through dictionaries of Italian cuisine populated by “hundreds of terms in regional dialects” (Fabricant), or via the publication of cookbooks dedicated to regional rather than Italian cooking, the public discourse on Italian food culture was continuously centered on the idea that “Italians don’t really have a national cuisine: they cook regional dishes on what’s available locally” (O’Neil). In 1999, the publication of Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s book The Italian Country Table was even met with avowed skepticism, asking “How can it be [Italian], considering that Italy is well-known for the distinct culinary traditions of its regions?” A reassurance soon followed, though, guaranteeing that “Ms. Kaper’s recipes are ‘authentic’” (Hesser).

  • 12 Besides being a popular cook writer, Bastianich is also the owner of several Italian restaurants in (...)
  • 13 They are the authors of, respectively, The Food of Southern Italy (1987), Sicilian Food: Recipes Fr (...)

26The most famous representative of this new generation of immigrant tastemakers was Lidia Bastianich. Originally from the Istrian-Friulan region, Bastianich followed Hazan’s footsteps, “setting out to bring true Italian culinary culture to America” (Bastianich) through her restaurants, cookbooks, and, more importantly, TV shows.12 Her success further confirmed the north-bound rediscovery of Italian regional foodways initiated by Hazan in the 1970s. In 1990, Bastianich published her first cookbook, La Cucina di Lidia: Distinctive Regional Cuisine From the North of Italy. A few months later, it was publicly noted that American interest in Italian food was still characterized by a “northern accent” (“Spots Where Italian Food Gets a Northern Accent”). In the subsequent years, however, the search for Italian culinary authenticity also moved southward, bringing to fruition the full rehabilitation of the country’s gastronomic heritage. As food expert Amanda Hesser noted on the pages of The New York Times in 1998, while “the initial rebellion against the red sauce of the South was fought by exploiting the regional cuisine of the North,” students of Italian gastronomy and food writers had “turned their attention to the far regions of the South,” discovering “a world apart from the heavy monotonous red sauce familiar in the US.” Among them were not only famous chefs like Salvatore Anzalone or Mario Batali (soon to become a celebrity chef), but also food writers and amateurs like Carlo Middione, Mary Taylor Simeti, and Marlena De Blasi, who constantly moved back and forth between the two countries (Simeti; Fabricant).13 Moreover, during the 1990s, Italian food also made its way from American TV screens to the U.S. movie theaters, thanks to a young Italian American actor and screenwriter and his movie on two Italian American brothers staging a “Big Night” in their Italian restaurant.

3. Searching for Italy

27Before Julia Roberts’ heaping plate of spaghetti in Eat Pray Love (2010), there was Stanley Tucci’s timpano in Big Night (1996). The movie, written by Tucci with his cousin Joseph Tropiano, tells the story of Primo and Secondo, two Italian emigrées in postwar New Jersey, who are struggling to keep up their purely Italian restaurant vis à vis the competition from a nearby stereotypically Italian American restaurant. The latter is run by Pascal, a figure that embodies all of the clichés of the “excessive mamma-mia Italianness” commonly associated with Jersey Shore Italian Americans (Rafferty). As Mario Batali would later comment in his foreword to The Tucci Cookbook, “The film was a microcosm of the Italian immigrant experience in the United States” (Tucci). In less than two hours, it perfectly summarized the whole trajectory of Italian cuisine in the U.S. during the postwar decades. On the one hand, there is the Americanized and popular food proposed by Pascal, whose restaurant is packed every night, meeting the expectations of uneducated American customers for spaghetti and meatballs. On the other hand, we see the gastronomic truth expressed by Primo, who refuses to make any concession to American taste (“Who are these people in America?,” he scornfully comments when a lady customer demands a side of spaghetti with her risotto) and is committed to offering only authentic Italian food. To him, “what goes on every night in that [Pascal’s] restaurant” is nothing less than “the rape of cuisine.” In between them stands Secondo (played by Tucci), who patiently explains to the customers that “sometimes the spaghetti likes to be alone,” meeting his brother’s stubbornness with both frustration and admiration. Although he values Primo’s culinary art, Secondo is fascinated with U.S. entrepreneurship, eager to enjoy the pleasures of American consumer society, and willing to adapt his Italian foodways to the rules of American business. It is through his mediatory role that the American guests of their big night ultimately swoon at the taste of their three-course Italian dinner.

28The success of the movie symbolically sanctioned the popularization of a new image and public discourse around Italian gastronomy in the U.S. The Italian press positively greeted Big Night as “a film that changed the fate of Italian food culture in the US: no longer the site of dubious culinary promiscuity but rather the cradle of gastronomic philology, cherished by chefs engaging in epic battles of civilization in the name of good taste, against customers ordering risotto with a side of spaghetti and meatballs” (Redazione). The movie also represented a turning point in Tucci’s life and career, paving the way for him to become the ultimate authenticator of Italian food culture for Italian, American, and even international audiences. In his own words, not only did Big Night heighten his “interest in all things culinary,” but the movie also became an enduring source of inspiration for “restaurateurs, chefs, and food lovers” interested in discovering Italian gastronomic culture (Tucci 2021), making Tucci a trusted point of reference on Italian food.

  • 14 See Stanley Tucci interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, May 10, 2022, available at edition.cnn (...)

29In all his literary and television productions dedicated to Italian cuisine, Tucci has always been keen to emphasize his Italian origins “on both sides,” re-iterating his familiarity with true Italian foodways, passed on to him by his mother “who raised him to admire the details of craft and learn the value of precision, shaping his view of what Italian cooking should be today: ‘The ingredients have to be right, the quality of the ingredients has to be right, and the specificity of how you treat those ingredients must be exact’” (Chapel). These performances of authenticity have been instrumental in granting him a role in the national discourse on Italian foodways, certifying his credible status as a cultural mediator who can be trusted to discern what is genuinely Italian and, therefore, guide American and international audiences toward truly Italian gastronomy. Tucci’s repeated food trips to Italy, in the context of programs like CNN Searching For Italy (2021–2022) and, more recently, National Geographic’s Tucci in Italy (2025), are publicly represented as a nostos: an emotional journey back to “an ancestral homeland,” where he can find his roots and re-connect with Italy’s culinary (and by extension cultural) heritage.14 It feels somehow like the completion of a full circle: whether Hazan claimed to bring true Italian cuisine to the American audiences, Tucci goes back to Italy, bringing American audiences to see for themselves, to experience, at least visually, what Italian gastronomic culture “authentically” is. This idea finds explicit expression in the closing remarks of Tucci in Italy’s episode on Abruzzo, where Tucci meets local chef Davide Nanni. The latter emotionally recalls his decision to move to America only to realize that he belonged in Italy, leading Tucci to comment how “all throughout Italy, I’ve met so many people who emigrated only to return: like Davide, they are drawn back by Italy’s unparalleled food culture and compelled to write the next chapter.” Italy’s food culture is thus represented as a story constantly shaped by a flowing and ongoing movement of people across the two countries.

30Overall, Tucci’s TV shows, combined with his four culinary memoirs and his active food-related presence on social media, appear to pursue two interconnected goals: showcasing his Italianness through his appreciation of food and countering common American stereotypes of Italian cuisine. He avowedly does so by exploring Italy’s culinary traditions “region by region.” He thus follows in the footsteps of Italian American “tastemakers” before him, contributing to the construction of an Italian food identity that is essentially regional and distant from its Italian American counterpart. This aspect is particularly emphasized in the public press to promote his TV programs, which underscored how “the series shows all kinds of Italian cooking, not just spaghetti and meatballs […] Tucci indulges in regional dishes and ingredients less often served in American Italian restaurants” (Napp).

31In his quest for culinary authenticity, Tucci appears—to quote food journalist Helen Rosener —“ostensibly educational.” He obsequiously reproduces the image of Italy’s gastronomic culture as regional and timeless, thereby reinforcing the dominant narrative that food is an essential constituent of Italian identity. The opening remarks of his latest show echo those of the previous one. In Searching For Italy, Tucci expressed his commitment “to discover how the food in each of this country’s twenty regions is unique as the people and their history”; in Tucci in Italy he similarly declares how, in Italy, “even the shape of your pasta and the sauce you serve it with speak directly to identity and differentiate the character and history of each region sharply from the next.” Acknowledging and discovering the regional character of Italian food is hence indicated as a way to find gastronomic genuineness, as well as to add value to the made in Italy food offer. Asked about what makes Italian foodways different from their Italian American counterpart and what Americans can “glean” from his experience, Tucci explains how Italians are “more traditional,” they do not allow for variations to “the way [food] it’s been done for a thousand years: they’re quite dogmatic.”15 As Primo in Big Night, then, Italians are represented as a people clinging to their culinary traditions, faithful to preserving their foods and recipes from possible contamination.

32As a result, Tucci himself ends up being just as dogmatic, sticking to the public discourse on food and Italianness outlined, since the 1970s, by Hazan in the U.S. and by the “turn to quality made in Italy consent” in the peninsula. On the one hand, his TV shows have contributed to sustaining the global prestige of Italian food, leading to what Italian American chef Rocco Di Spirito has defined as a new “post-Renaissance era” marked by the continuous “expansion of hyper-authentic regional Italian food” (Cotto). On the other hand, Tucci’s popularity seems to sanction the passage from canonization to a renewed stereotypization: the representation of Italian food identity has, for sure, rid itself of any spaghetti and meatball fantasy but is nonetheless crystallized in a series of predictable images and values. As Helen Rosener evidenced regarding Searching For Italy, “its culinary discoveries (balsamic vinegar in Modena, pizza in Naples, risotto in Milan) are not new … the Italy we are shown is suspended in a dreamlike past.” Her words are echoed, on the other side of the Atlantic, by the recent review of Tucci in Italy proposed by Gambero Rosso: a famous Italian food magazine that, back in 1986, significantly contributed to launching and popularizing Slow Food. While recognizing that Tucci’s latest show has “raised the bar compared to the first series,” Gambero Rosso’s article significantly notes how Tucci’s representation of Italy and its food “remains within the boundaries of a narrative that pleases the audiences, a narrative that favors moving across only food excellences: Rather than a survey of Italy’s food, it seems like a collection of case studies for a conference on made in Italy” (Montevergine).

33These considerations strike a crucial point: Tucci’s discourse on Italian food is yet another media instance reinforcing a set of stereotypical representations whose origin—as we have seen—dates back to the efforts undertaken since the 1970s to differentiate real Italian food from its industrialized versions on both sides of the Atlantic. As such, it also provides an imaginative setting for Italy’s gastrodiplomacy, taking part in the transition of food from a key element in Italy’s (trans)nation-building process to being incorporated into the country’s (trans)nation-branding strategies. In this sense, Tucci’s popularity in Italy also rests on his being the latest in a long series of transatlantic tastemakers who have promoted genuinely Italian food as a quality food. His representation of Italian gastronomic culture reinforces Italians’ self-identification as a food-loving people. In doing so, he participates in creating those food “stories,” “standards,” and “personalities” that help sustain what Ellwood considers “Italy’s lead in gastrodiplomacy” (“Eating for Your Country”). This consists of “the world presence of Italian cuisine” and its commercial power, as well as the central role acknowledged to gastronomy in Italy’s cultural politics, which has provided “a lesson” for other countries to follow (Elindawati and Nugrahani).

34Both Italy’s gastrodiplomatic efforts and the foodie narrative on Italianness that sustains these efforts must therefore be considered from a transatlantic point of view, moving along the circulatory networks of people, products, and ideas that have given shape to such a narrative across Italy and the U.S. A constant confrontation with America has underlain the canonization of a public discourse linking food to Italy’s cultural identity, whether through Italian Americans’ response to industrialized Italian food in the U.S, or via the Italian reaction to American fast food in Italy. The appeal of this narrative to American audiences is evident in the overwhelming feeling that, from the 1990s to the present, Italy has increasingly hegemonized American food-adjacent TV shows (Makalintal). On the one hand, then, American media outlets and cultural mediators have provided the tools and context for an Italianization of the U.S. consumer culture. As I have attempted to highlight, this Italianization is rooted in a more extended history of Italian Americans’ efforts to negotiate their way into U.S. society. On the other hand, the transnational promotion of a foodie Italianness must be framed within the broader history of the Americanization of Italian society. This includes the popularization of Italian food-related content through American-inspired/imported media platforms, the latest example of which is the launch of Gamberorosso TV: a TV channel entirely dedicated to food. Its presentation as “the Netflix of Italian enogastronomy” further evidences the American media paradigm as the main reference point (“Nasce Gamberorosso.tv”).

4. Conclusion

  • 16 Alberto Grandi is a popular historian and author of the book Denominazione di Origine Inventata (20 (...)

35Although the American roots of Italian cuisine have been well-documented in the scholarly research on Italian American history, this notion has gained widespread recognition beyond academia only recently. Through their public outreach, historians like Alessandro Barbero and, most of all, Antonio Grandi,16 have provocatively spread the idea that “Italian national cuisine does not exist except among Italian Americans” (Giorgi), framing it as “a recent marketing invention” that exists, if it ever did, “only in America” (Grandi and Soffiati). In doing so, they have contributed to increasing public awareness of the historical processes that have shaped Italy’s representation in gastronomic terms; however, they have also perpetuated the idea of Italy’s gastronomic culture as essentially regional, describing it as “a collection of countless local cuisines” (Barbero). The large polemic raised by Grandi’s public declarations confirms the cultural and political relevance that Italians ascribe to their gastronomic heritage (Bonnel; Giusti; Loreti; Cristiani). It also speaks to how deeply entrenched in people’s common sense is the relation between Italian identity and Italian foodways, whose commercial and cultural value is considered to reside precisely in their regional variations.

36When, in 2010, McDonald’s launched its “McItaly burger,” British food journalist Matthew Fort doubted the success of the initiative, pointing out how “for many Italians, their very sense of identity lies in the food, not just of the region in which they were born, but of the town, village, hamlet, even house. And they hold to the superiority of their local produce and dishes with passion.” To that day, the country was still listed among the American chain’s “emerging markets,” indicating McDonald’s continuous struggle to win Italian stomachs.

37And yet, the idea of Italy’s food culture as a repository of culinary authenticity and locality is just as much an American as an Italian construction, originating from the interaction between the perceived Americanization of Italian food and the transatlantic development of a gastronomic Italian identity. Within this framework, the present contribution has been intended to solicit the adoption of a circulatory and transatlantic point of view to the study of Italy’s food culture: American media and cultural mediators contributed to shaping, institutionalizing, and spreading a canonic narrative about made in Italy food equating it to notions of quality, authenticity, and regional variety. Then again, the popularization of this narrative has influenced both American mediascapes and food habits. It follows the call to rethink the notions of Americanization and Italianization not merely as two-way parallel dynamics but, more radically, as mutually involving processes of cross-cultural contamination operating within a transnational space of circulatory exchange and consumption.

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Notes

1 Unless otherwise specified, all translations from Italian to English are mine.

2 The privatization of Italian TV began in the mid-1970s following a series of rulings by Italy’s Constitutional Court. This liberalized cable (1974) and then also over-the-air broadcasting (1976), ending Rai’s public monopoly and leading to the emergence of Silvio Berlusconi’s private TV networks (Ortoleva; Grasso). In this context, it is no surprise that, among the financial groups at the head of some of the new private TV networks, one could find food companies like Calisto Tanzi’s Parmalat. It is likewise telling that in 1987 Berlusconi’s Fininvest took over “Standa,” namely one of Italy’s leading supermarket chains.

3 Lodovico Gasparini, dir., Italian Fast Food, 1986, Columbia Pictures Italia.

4 Camera di Commercio, Industria, Artigianato e Agricoltura di Milano – Archivio Storico, Faldone 1494796/01 (vol. 1) – 459/012/01: “Relazione di stima del valore patrimoniale del ramo d’azienda contraddistinto dai marchi ‘Burghy’ e ‘Italy & Italy,” p. 8.

5 This tendency is echoed in the scholarly literature: the persistent localism of Italian food culture has led many to speak of—in Vera Zamagni’s words—Italy’s “incomplete alimentary modernization” (1998).

6 The origin of Slow Food should also be addressed from a transatlantic perspective. This is not simply because its creation was a response to the spread of fast food, but also in light of the influence of American counter-cultural movements over Slow Food’s founding ideas. Slow Food’s founder Carlo Petrini has repeatedly acknowledged the inspiring role of American food activists like Alice Waters or Wendell Berry. For more information on the U.S. counter-cultural organic food movement see Belasco’s study in the works cited.

7 The notion is borrowed from Simone Cinotto (2017).

8 As seen, this kind of response was not so different from what would happen in Italy a decade later.

9 A later example of this re-discovering and codification of authentically Italian American cuisine is Nancy Verde Barns’ We Called It Maccaroni, published in 1990.

10 Hazan’s contribution to shaping American society and culture has recently received official recognition through the inclusion of her copper zabaglione pot in the 250 significant objects selected to mark the celebrations of the US 250th anniversary.

11 This re-habilitation of Italy’s image in the U.S. has recently been investigated within the interdisciplinary research project “Transatlantic Transfers: The Italian Presence in Postwar America.” See: https://transatlantictransfers.polimi.it/it/ (Last accessed: June 2025).

12 Besides being a popular cook writer, Bastianich is also the owner of several Italian restaurants in New York, including “Felidia” and “Becco” (which she owns with her son, Joe Bastianich). She has hosted several TV cooking shows dedicated to Italian and Italian American cuisine, such as Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen (PBS, 1998) Lidia’s Farm Table (2004), and Lidia’s Italy (2007).

13 They are the authors of, respectively, The Food of Southern Italy (1987), Sicilian Food: Recipes From Italy’s Abundant Isle (1991), and Regional Food From Southern Italy (1999).

14 See Stanley Tucci interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, May 10, 2022, available at edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/10/05/amanpour-stanley-tucci-searching-for-italy-season-two.cnn.

15 See the interview with Tucci on CNN, July 10, 2022: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/travel/2022/10/07/stanley-tucci-searching-for-italy-origseriesfilms-family-tips.cnn (Last accessed: June 2025).

16 Alberto Grandi is a popular historian and author of the book Denominazione di Origine Inventata (2018) and its spin-off podcast. His most recent book, La cucina italiana non esiste, was published in 2024.

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References

Electronic reference

Giulia Crisanti, American Media and the Taste for Italy: Placing the Construction of Italian Food Identity in a Transatlantic Setting, 1970s–2020sEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-3 | 2025, Online since 01 December 2025, connection on 24 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/24748; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15dmc

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About the author

Giulia Crisanti

Giulia Crisanti is postdoctoral research fellow at Sapienza University in Rome. She received her PhD in Modern History from Fordham University (New York) in May 2021. From 2022 to 2025 she worked as a teaching adjunct of U.S. History at the University of Pisa. Her research interests include the history of Italy-U.S. relations and cultural exchanges, business and consumer history, media and television history, and food history. Her book, Europeans Are Lovin’it? Coca Cola, McDonald’s and Responses to American Global Businesses in Italy and France, 1886-2015 (Brill, 2023) received the Rob Kroes Publication Award from the European Association of American Studies (EAAS).

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