“An American in Rome” is a 1954 film directed by Steno, stage name Stefano Vanzina. The film’s protagonist, played by Alberto Sordi, is a young simpleton from the suburbs who is fanatical about the American way of life, filtered through overseas cinema (especially westerns and war movies). Admiration that extends to the food arena.
The most well-known scene in the film is that of the eating of an evening meal. According to the protagonist’s stereotypical thought pattern, Americans would consume jam, mustard, milk and yogurt for dinner. Spread all together on a slice of bread, as soon as they are swallowed they cause an immediate rejection reaction, made explicitly visible.
It follows that milk is destined for the cat and yogurt for the rat (read: mouse). Mustard, on the other hand, will come in handy for exterminating bedbugs. Indi a sudden conversion to a more familiar and healthy Mediterranean diet, then repudiated to make way for that imported from the States.
Our Lord, manifesting great voracity, dives greedily into the plate of pasta, in this specific case spaghetti, declined maccaroni, prepared by his mother, watering it generously with red wine contained in a fiasco, a glass vessel, lined with marsh grasses, oval in shape and with an elongated neck: a container that has all but disappeared from the tables of the Italian middle and lower middle class.
(Bruno Nobile)
