Italy In SF

During my layover in Munich this past weekend I walked into the Fabriano store in the terminal. I found there a book called Italianismi (that I obviously can’t find anywhere else) about the cornerstones of an Italian upbringing, being it the traditional “T” of the Tabacchi store (the official outlet of tobacco products, also the only other place where you can find stamps and lottery tickets!), the red stripes of the Carabinieri pants, or the classic Nutella.

As I was thinking about it, it inspired to create my own list of italianismi, quintessential staples of being a child in Italy during the 70s. I encourage you all to add more…

1. Japanese Cartoons: while American kids were raised watching The Jetsons and He-Man, Italian children in the 70s were all about the Japanese anime-inspired cartoons. The categories were endless. The classic robots (Goldrake, Jeeg, Mazinga Z, Daitan III, etc) the sport sagas (Holly and Benji soccer players, Mimi and Mila and Shiro, the volleyball wizards, Sanpei the fishermen, etc), the equivalent of chickflicks (Candy Candy, Lulu’ and the Seven Color Flowers, etc), arcane Harry Potters series (Bia the witch, Magic Amy, Carletto the king of monsters, etc), and the almost-grown up cartoons (Pollon, but most of all Lamu’, the secret fantasy of an entire generation of 15 year-olds!)- the opening title songs to this day take up more brain space than the entire ancient Roman history!
2. Cornetto Algida: we have talked a lot about real gelato here, but when we were kids we were just as subjects to the marketing campaigns of the era as modern kids are. So, a staple of our summers was a pre-packed gelato from Algida, a nation-wide famed brand that branded its cornetto (little cone) Cuore di Panna (heart of cream) with a multi-year long ad campaign showing tweens dealing with their first crush. It was impossible to have a summer crush without a shared cornetto algida to “seal the deal”!
3. Brooklyn Chewing Gums: another branding hit. Every kid chewed gum, and Brooklyn, a wisely named Italian candy brand owned by Perfetti, labeled itself  la gomma del ponte, the gum of the bridge. To feel like a cool American kid, you had to have Brooklyn- they ended up with a 90% market share, that’s how good their marketing was! This commercial completely got us mesmerized… Obviously, that’s when we realized the only flavor we were allowed to have to be REALLY cool was the white, spearmint one…
   
4. Topolino- I learned how to read on Topolino, and with me many many many children of the70s. Topolino is a very Italian fenomenon: Disney let the rights to the comic publication of Mickey Mouse comic strips  to Mondadori in the 1930s. They created a chldren penomenon: a weekly publication geared toward a pre-teen audience with longer comics centered around the Disney characters of Topolino and Paperino (Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck), which ended up taking a very distinctive personality along with precise familiy ties that often go beyond the original characters. Every Italian child would go to the edicola and buy Topolino weekly, following the various tales, articles, giveaways and commercials with religious punctuality… also, the tales were traidtionally all written in capitol letters, making them easy to read for all! More on Topolino on Wikipedia, in Italian only.

   

5. Bicycles: whether you had a Hollander, a Rita, a BMX or a bici da cross, as a kid the bike was your only mean of transportation. Whether you blame it on the oil crisis of the 70s (I remember when on Sundays there was a complete ban on automobiles to save gas!), on the one-car-per-family standard, or simply on parents that were not as available for our activities, whatever you wanted to do you needed to get to on a bike. Often you would carry your friends on the back of the bike or o the handlebar, and fare un giro in bici (take a spin on the bike) was the ultimate socializing skill…

I am coming up with more, but if you think of any please let me know in the comments!

Filed under: Culinary Culture, italy