The role of the table in the stereotypical construction of Italianness abroad

Abstract

The relationship between the consumption of pasta and the Italic culture is considered a natural fact. Yet this food model is the result of a long process of transformations and enhancements that have ended up connoting Italianness as a form of life. Pasta has not always held the centrality that is recognized and it is to be attributed both to reasons of food history and to the social and political events of the country. Mass emigration has played a disruptive role by contaminating the world imagination, as well as modifying the original one. With regard to visual representation, we recognize the modeling action of the gaze of others in the intertwining of stereotypes that have been nourished and consolidated thanks to an incessant intertextuality between painting, photography, cinema, starting from the founding season of landscape painting and the picturesque.