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M ACARONI-EATER S: H OW a NATIONAL S T EREOTYPE ARO SE
Among the characteristic epithets related to the food and local
customs of Italy, the one that assumed with time a different and quite singular role because it was tendentiously unifying was “macaroni-eaters,” in other words, pasta-eaters—in the broad connotation that the term maccheroni tends to have in the languages of the south. The importance of pasta, which during the Middle Ages had already established a significant place for itself in the alimentary system of Italy, suddenly increased in the first half of the seventeenth century, as described by Emilio Sereni in 1958. The change was noted in Naples, where, under Spanish rule, problems of production and the inefficiency of the public market caused the progressive decline of resources that had been the principal ingredients of the popular diet—meat and vegetables, primarily cabbage. This provoked a change in the dietary bal-
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ance with a heavy shift to the side of carbohydrates. Bread and pasta, like polenta and potatoes elsewhere, became increasingly dominant. Pasta in particular, thanks to a small technological revolution brought about by the greater availability of the muller1 and the invention of the mechanical press, began to be produced at lower costs, encouraging its promotion as a “basic” food. If until then pasta was one among many products, even considered a luxury (so much so that in the sixteenth century its fabrication was prohibited in Naples during periods of famine so as not to encroach on the production of bread), now for the first time it became a food of the people, the main dish in the daily diet of the urban poor. From the seventeenth century on, it was Neapolitans who acquired the nickname of “macaronieaters,” appropriating it from the Sicilians (who in the Middle Ages had first adopted the Arab model of dried noodles). The pairing of pasta and cheese, to which tomato sauce was added in the nineteenth century, took the upper hand over the traditional duality of cabbage and meat: a dietary solution ingenious in its own way because it assured an adequate intake of calories as well as the desired feeling of satiety. Consequently, macaroni became synonymous with Naples. It is interesting that at the time of the unification of Italy, the conquest of Naples was represented as an orgy of pasta and of Sicily as an orgy of oranges. On the 26th of July 1860, with the occupation of the island accomplished and the landing of 1
A grinding device.
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Garibaldi’s troops on the continent anticipated, Cavour2 wrote to Piedmont’s ambassador in France, “Oranges are already on our table and we are about to eat them. As for macaroni, we will have to wait, since they are not yet cooked.” The 7th of November Garibaldi entered Naples and Cavour wrote: “The macaroni are cooked and we will eat them.” These expressions could be seen as malicious—the north that “eats” the south—but should more accurately be interpreted as reflecting the desire of the political class of Piedmont to credit its own role as guarantor of the interests and traditions of all regions at that delicate moment in the country’s unification. To this end, in addition to political programs, a psychological program was instigated, the “southernization” of the northern [Piedmontese] identity, and herein alimentary symbols became decisive, as they always do. To eat macaroni suggests sharing a culture, thereby transforming the symbol of Naples (and by extension the entire south) into a symbol of the nation. The “national revolution,” insofar as it signifies “the acquisition of the south by the north,” was also a revolution of the gastronomic image that, in the words of Franco La Cecla, “pulls farther north the Mediterranean blanket of which macaroni [is] an essential part.”3 Camillo Benso, count of Cavour, was a leading figure in the unification of Italy and prime minister to the king of Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel, who became the first king of Italy.
2
3 It must be remembered that until Italy was unified in 1861, Naples and Sicily were ruled by the Bourbons of Spain and that Piedmont was an independent kingdom under the House of Savoy.
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In the meantime, the Neapolitan “model” spread throughout southern Italy, where initially it had only interested urban and coastal areas, more attuned to the logic and mechanics of the food market. In rural regions of the interior, pasta remained for a long time a food for the rich, eaten by the poor only rarely, so that in the early years of the twentieth century, testimony gathered by parliamentary investigations still defined macaroni as a “regal dish.” Already then, however, the appellation “macaroni-eaters” had acquired a broader meaning, representative not only of Neapolitans but of southern Italians in general, at the very time that the political–cultural project of the House of Savoy sought to confer on them an even moreencompassing meaning of “Italianness.” The development of this image owed a great deal to the dramatic phenomenon of the emigration that, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, scattered millions of Italians in search of work and food throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. More typical of the south, from which the majority of the immigrants came, the consumption of pasta was seen as a distinctive element of the Italian “difference.” The stereotype, as is common, was constructed by others to distinguish and to a degree deprecate the newcomers and their strange customs. Nevertheless, the stereotype also took hold internally. The dream of pasta—as it had remained for many Italians forced to leave their native land—was more easily realized in America. With employment, families had greater resources and could afford the pasta industry that had crossed 44 |
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the ocean precisely to respond to that custom, or to that unsatisfied desire. America, the land of plenty, where Carnival4 was more than a metaphor, made it possible at last to have pasta, and meat too, on the daily table, and was the true locus of this Italian stereotype. It was in America that many southern peasants became “macaroni-eaters,” and it was they who invented spaghetti and meatballs, that prototypical ItaloAmerican dish. Along with pasta, other Italian food myths (parmesan, oil, wine, integrated with the new myth of steak) took root in Italian communities across the ocean, thanks to the integration that occurred between domestic customs and the business of groceries and restaurants. It was in those communities, through the contact of individuals and families from various parts of Italy, that an Italian style of eating arose, which in many cases preceded similar experiences in the home country. As Paola Corti has remarked, “through the channel of Italian restaurants in foreign countries, the regional traditions of the peninsula came together,” so that it can be said that “alimentary syncretism . . . characterizes the overall experience of the emigration.” It is merely a question of distance: the closer the object, the more the overall design obscures the details; the farther away from the local perspective, the more the traits held in common Carnevale, in Italian, meaning “goodbye to meat,” is the festive period before Lent. 4
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become visible and new connections are made. Urban identity dissolves in a regional setting, regional identity dissolves in a national setting. But one thing does not exclude another. Identity is always multiple: local/urban, regional, national. As a young woman born in Argentina of Italian parents said: “I feel Italian . . . because my customs . . . my way of eating . . . my tastes are entirely Italian. . . . Yes, and Biellese,5 Piemontese.” Dialect is not antagonistic to Italian. It complements it, “inflects” it.
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An inhabitant of the city of Biella, in Piedmont.