How the U.S. made pizza popular (in Italy)

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Expect this to be more controversial than most political topics

This doesn't just apply to Italy. Vast majority of dishes associated with various countries only took their modern form in the last hundred or so years.

It's actually quite common for traditions to simply have been invented not that long ago. In the 19th century, the "traditions" of Bavaria were invented by royals because there were none before, Bavaria wasn't as unified as was always and still is constantly said. They needed something to bind Bavaria together, and it worked maybe too well, so well that now many Bavarians see themselves as fully separate from Germany culturally.

This can be claimed to most foods we consider nowadays traditional, any food with meats in it were not really common everyday food throughout history

"Leave the gun, take the cannoli" and "my grandmother is a bicycle" are the greatest references ever.

Just judging by the title... I guess you didn't get enough hate mail?

I never put much stock in so-called "authenticity". I'm from a region in Malaysia famed for its cuisine and a lot of what foodfluencers might claim is "traditional" is really just a couple of generations old at most. One person innovated something with local ingredients in the 1970s, people loved it and then it caught on with other hawkers through word of mouth, and now people who grew up with this version of a particular dish call it traditional because it's how they, individually, have always had it.

Also you don't probably know but the colosseum and the tower of Pisa were built in the USA and then brought to Italy. Venice looks as it is today thanks to an engineer from Illinois that worked in Chicago, he was able to dig the city's channels after the knowledge he collected when chicago was built. Leonardo da Vinci? He was born in New York's little Italy and then moved to toscany. Finally, really few people know, Sardinia is now in Italy because it was brought there from the US soldiers after WWII but geologically speaking is coming from California and it is now there only artificially

Taking salvini as the standard italian says a lot about the simplistic approach of this video. Like yes, Pizza is not an italian tradition but a Neapolitan tradition. True. So? For it to be italian does it have to be a standardized thing in the country? And when you say Italy you don't necesseraly always mean the relatively modern country but also the geografical area.

The funny aspect about this video lays in the fact that it seems to identify the whole Italian cuisine with carbonara, pizza and parmesan cheese. First of all, I support a work of historical food "debunking", but done in a more accurate way: carbonara is generally thought to be a relatively modern (already existing before the war? Invented by American troops? By local people after the war? Who knows) variant of older and simpler "pastoral" pasta dishes, such as gricia (a sort of white carbonara with only guanciale, a sort of bacon, pecorino and black pepper). Pizza, although fried and/or baked in oven but only garnished with cheese, is documented since the XVI century in the area of Naples. Parmesan cheese changed many times through the centuries, depending on the shape preference and the feeding of the cows that influenced the taste and the way of milk fermentation ("old" parmesan cheese was more similar to a cheese called Granone Lodigiano), but is well known since the XIII-XIV centuries: Boccaccio mentions in the Decameron "Parmigiano grattugiato" (grated parmesan). Second, if you extend your range of investigation to the great rest of the Italian cuisine, you'll see a long line of continuity, in term of regional dishes, that gave finally birth to a unified Italian cuisine during the XIX century: the "Bible" of Italian cuisine, "La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene" published in 1891 by Pellegrino Artusi, collected a great number of regional recipes creating a sort of encyclopedia of Italian cuisine; so, there we can observe both continuity and innovation, in introducing new personal variants, foreign influences and in extending the range of local dishes (which in this way were not lost) to the whole recently unified Peninsula. And, for most of its recipes, the book by Artusi is still well present in modern and contemporary Italian cuisine.

You talking about the Italiamo packaging: "It screams quality, right?" No, it screams "LIDL". Because that's where that is from.

Even if the story about pizza margherita was fake it still was an aricle by a magazine in Rome (not naples) in 1880 and that means two things: 1)Pizza was known outside of naples 2)Pizza had cheese on it before the mass immigration of italians in the us( that came later)

Gonna be honest, I'm not sure what to believe. My Nonna came from Italy to the UK after WWII and one of her famous recipes in my family that she used to make was Tiramisu, but in the past when I previously looked it up the oldest date for Tiramisu I found is often in the 60's. On the other hand that old negative description of Pizza you found reminds of an early European description of potatoes where the guy basically talks about how disgusting and flavourless they are in similar language. I feel uneasy about taking the information in this video at face value without doing some of my own research on it.

As Italian, 4:54 is the death of your channel 😅 Plus we never eat pizza and pasta together, you have to choose between one of the two for your dinner

Neapolitans and southerners moved to the north for work and exported their pizza there, no americans were involved. Nice bait bro

At 10:00 it sounds like you are implying that the italian language was born in America through the interaction between italian immigrants from different regions, but that's just... wrong. Standard italian is based on the dialect spoken in Florence, and more specifically on the literary works of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. Because of this literary prestige, it started to be used as a lingua franca in Italy even before the unification, at least by wealthy and intellectuals - Pietro Bembo for instance, who came from Venice, started using it in the 1500s. The general population adopted it around the 1960s with the spread of radio and TV, and also thanks to internal migration towards the new industrial centers (Milan, Turin,...). Meanwhile in the US, italian americans developed their own lingua franca based on southern italian dialects, because that's where most of the immigrants there came from - northern italians mainly migrated to Brazil and Argentina instead. This explains why "gabagool" and "capocollo" are spelled and pronounced differently in the US and in Italy respectively. I also think you overstated the importance of "italian cuisine" in forming a national identity. Despite the fact that standard italian is today spoken by everybody in the country, regional dialects, traditions, and cuisines are still very much alive. Where I'm from (Veneto) nobody would claim neapolitan pizza or roman carbonara as part of their identity, even if we eat them frequently. People might rather be proud of the general quality and variety of italian gastronomy. And rather than football, I think people would talk (often obnoxiously) about roman and renaissaince history and art, or about the natural beauty of the country (in italian media Italy is often referred to as "il bel paese" - the beautiful country). Salvini will of course use any opportunity to complain about immigration, including "violated" food recipes, but this does not mean that it is a major focus of his political platform. And yeah, like many italians I already knew that carbonara and tiramisù are recent inventions, I mean, you need a fridge to make the latter!

I noticed that the presenter chose to highlight only 4-6 types of Italian foods, and while it's a valid choice, one might wonder about the vast diversity in Italian cuisine, especially when referencing an "identity crisis". Given that Italy boasts over 800 protected recipes, the chosen representation might appear a bit limited. It's worth acknowledging that Italian food is incredibly diverse, with dishes less internationally known like Frico with potatoes from Friuli being as cherished as Pizza from Napoli. My Italian grandfather, for instance, had his own culinary preferences, which didn't necessarily include dishes like pizza. It's key to remember that specific dishes, be it Pizza or tortellini, might not be representative of the entire national identity for many Italians.

Forgot to mention about the Pompeii wall painting revealed this year, showing something someone claims is ancient pizza!

You mentioned that most of the regions in Italy before they were unified didn't even know about dished that other regions had, and it's true, and sometimes dishes had the same name but were very different, like pizza. You quote something, and you say that pizza came from that one region, and it was a poor people dish, but... The word "pizza" existed since the roman era, and the first actual mention of the word "pizza" was in a text over 500 years ago, about food that was served the pope and others of high standing a few hundred yeas ago. Well it was very different, It was a fluffy Bread dish, round few cm high, almost cake-like, spread with rose water & Sugar. And in other places the word "pizza" meant something different, similar to what you quote, similar to the dish we know today. But still quite different, we don't have a text as old or neutral as the rose pizza recipe. But not very long ago, the maybe first illustration of the very first pizza was found on the colorful walls of Pompeii. We don't know a lot about it, but it might not have been the poor people dish, like it was said by the one person 200 years ago. We don't know, but it is definitely very different from the dish we know today.