5 Problematic Things the U.S. Exports to Italy

Culturally, the U.S. has an outsized influence on the world, but is that always a good thing?

Photo taken by the New York Post

Do you remember that game called Telephone we played as kids? We sat in a circle, and one person whispered a secret in the next person’s ear who whispered it in the next person’s ear, and so on down the line. By the time that secret returned full circle, it had morphed into something barely recognizable as the original secret.

If you started with a relatively tame statement such as, “Kevin likes Angela,” by the time it made it back to you, Angela was pregnant with Kevin’s baby, her parents didn’t approve, and now Angela’s mom was driving her to Cleveland for an abortion.

Italy’s interpretation of American culture is a bit like that: not the same thing, heavily “Italianated,” and filtered through so many cultural lenses, the end product is often unrecognizable. Or just plain wrong.

Take the Confederate flag, for example. You see it everywhere in Italy—flying from flag poles, screen printed on T-shirts, spray painted on the top of a jeep downstairs (we moved—thank God we don’t have to look at that anymore.) John’s patient attempts to explain what a hateful symbol of Black oppression that flag is tend to fall on deaf ears. Italians just don’t understand. To them, it’s American, Texas/country music/whiskey and therefore cool. During Mardi Gras festivities at our former village of Civita Castellana, entire floats were decked out in American-themed effluvia: girls in ten-gallon hats, shit-kicker boots, cheap plastic holsters sporting cheap plastic guns, and of course, that hateful flag. They waved it like General King surrendering his troops to the Japanese Army on the Bataan Peninsula.

I nearly choked.

In Trastevere, a popular Roman neighborhood, I saw a life-sized cardboard cutout of Aunt Jemima, complete with headscarf and ear-to-ear grin, standing in front of a pizza joint. It was so appalling, I didn’t even stop to take a photo.

Then there’s Italy’s most popular themed chain restaurant, Old Wild West. Italy doesn’t really do theme or chain restaurants, and is all the better for it. This one comes from France, oddly, so it’s a French interpretation of a wildly mythologized American West retrofitted for an Italian audience. Every single thing about this place is wrong.

The name, for starters. Americans might say “Old West” or “Wild West,” but we don’t say “Old Wild West.” But why bother asking someone who might know? There are two totem poles at the entrance, a pretend jail where you can peer through the bars like a “real” outlaw, a giant racoon that defies my attempts to make sense of it, a cigar store Indian—to say nothing of the word “Indian” itself, which is splashed around like cheap perfume. Nooses dangle from every rafter. Black-and-white photos of various chieftains hang from every wall. The menu is a study in cultural miscegenation: “Caesar sauce,” “Gran [sic] Canyon meats,” “Grigliata Generale Custer.”

If this restaurant were in the U.S., someone would have already burned it to the ground.

Now, perhaps you think I’m being too dainty. Few things are more annoying than a tofu-eating, fair-trade-coffee-swilling, avocado-toast-loving wokerati like me. But the point I’m trying to make here isn’t just that American flour pushed through an Italian sieve becomes something monstrous and inedible, but that Americans get Italian culture wrong, too. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths, anyone? How about a raffia-bottomed demijohn with candle wax dribbling down the sides? Or the fact that Olive Garden even exists? Real Italians don’t smother their food in marinara sauce and cheese. These failed Italian food experiments belong to the food court at the mall.

But the five American imports/exports that most put my teeth on edge are these—and I don’t blame Italy for them. Most result from American corporations expanding into new markets where they can capitalize on the fact that “American” has a certain social cachet, although for the life of me, I can’t imagine why. (True story: I once saw a full page ad in a major Italian newspaper that read: BAG IS OVER. That was it. No photos, no artwork, just that one grammatically mangled declarative sentence.)

Bad Import #1:

SUVs.

To be clear, it’s not American SUVs Italians are importing so much as the environmentally disastrous habit of driving one. Jeep Renegade and Jeep Compass are, however, bestsellers. Like anyone else in any region except Northern Europe where they have actual words for “humility,” “just enough,” and “everything in moderation,” Italians are status seekers. This is especially true when it comes to cars.

Italy makes gorgeous ones.

But in the last six years or so, cars have gotten substantially bigger. It’s an eerie flashback to the mid-90s in the United States when SUVs started taking over the highways. And hey, maybe the U.S. has the road space to accommodate large vehicles, but Italy doesn’t. In the historic centers especially, roads are the same width they were back in the 1200s. Navigating them in an SUV is the vehicular equivalent is trying to thread a needle with rope. I’d pay money to know how many of these tanks are in the body shop at any given moment getting the scrapes buffed off their sides.

Seven words: Gas prices. Environment. Putin. Invasion of Ukraine.

Big car? Not a good choice.

Bad Import #2:

Fast food.

McDonald's has 640 restaurants in Italy. Per its website, the corporation employs 27,000 Italians, which is no small thing in a country where jobs are scarce. Look, I get it. We all have to eat.

But it’s what we’re eating at places like McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC that should give us pause. There is a mountain of information about the ill effects of fast food, all of which is calorically dense, highly flavored, and nutritionally barren. Fast foods typically contain corn syrup, sugar, artificial sweeteners, salt, coloring agents, and other potentially disease-promoting chemicals that are largely unknown in Italy, a nation that prides itself on its fresh, homecooked cuisine. Some evidence points to junk foods being as addictive as drugs and alcohol. After all, McDonald’s spent millions researching how to create the perfect trifecta of sugar, fat, and salt. Their aim has always been to hook consumers from a very young age, regardless of the obesity epidemic that results from that and other packaged foods.

Good rule of thumb: if a foodstuff has more than five ingredients on the label, give it a hard pass.

But young Italians aren’t hip to the danger of eating fast food. Their grandmothers are (no self-respecting nonna approves of fast food), but on any given night at a place like McDonald’s on the Corso Francia in Rome, it’s packed. Three in the morning, they’re still in there, all these stylish young Romans buying “Beek Mahks” and fries. A line of cars idles at the drive-thru. Same thing at the McDonald’s in Orte, all the more sinister and ironic since the best fresh mozzarella shop is fifty feet away.

Bad Import #3:

Duck lips.

My God, these things are everywhere. Every Instagram model, it seems, inflates her lips with a bicycle pump, and Italian women are no exception. The trend started on social media when young women started posing with their lips pressed together in a “trout pout” while simultaneously sucking in their cheeks. The pose is meant to appear alluring, but even if it’s intended ironically or to hide self-conscious embarrassment, it’s ridiculous. Ten years from now, we’re all going to look back at this and cringe.

At some point, women decided that tender, puffy mouths were alluring even when they weren’t on Instagram, so they turned to injectable fillers. The Kardashian sisters spearheaded the trend, as they have so many other awful cosmetic procedures (i.e., the artificially inflated backside, snatched waist, fat-injected breasts, skin ablations, facial reconfiguration surgeries).

They deny it, of course.

Seriously. How stupid do they think we are?

Now, Italian women have big rubbery beach ball lips. Only a fraction of women get away with them, in my opinion. If you are part of that fraction, I say go for it. But for the rest—and please forgive me for stating my opinion so forcefully—they look truly awful.

Bad Import #4:

Violent Video Games.

“Call of Duty” is big here. So are games like “Assassins Creed” and “Batman: Arkham,” all of which show intense violence. An example of that would be the violence found in a game like “Batman: Arkham” where one character is beaten with a crowbar and another is shot in the chest. As you might expect, there have been lurid news items of teens who are self-professed “Call of Duty” junkies killing their parents with an ax, even here in Italy where such crimes are astonishingly rare.

Should there be an age-minimum of, say, 25 on these games? Yes. Is it going to happen? No. But it is yet another example of how American exports are doing harm to Italy.

Bad Import #5:

Pineapple on Pizza.

Any right-thinking Italian would tell you that putting pineapple on pizza is an act of war and all perpetrators ought to be brought before a tribunal at The Hague.

Yet, here we are.

To be fair, Italians themselves (most of them anyway) don’t have their collective knickers in a twist about pineapple pizza. To them, it’s merely a curiosity. To me, it’s a desecration. Amid fierce international debate on the subject, Italy’s ambassador to the UK, Raffaele Trombetta, weighed in with a resounding thumbs down, which I feel nails the coffin shut on this unspeakable congress of tropical fruit and nightshade.

I’m eager to know if you agree, disagree, or have things to add to the list of Bad American Imports. Be sure to chime in on the comments section below.

Keep Italy Italian!

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin