New York City, la più grande città del cibo italiano

This work offers an analysis of Italian restaurants in New York City. Historical literature and anthropological has repeatedly highlighted the role that Italian emigration to the east coast plays of the United States and the spread of gastronomic clothes marked as Italian in foreign territory they had in the construction of a tricolor gastronomic effigy (in part. Montanari 2010; Cinotto 2001; Cecla 1998). This interdependence strengthens the relationship from a semiotic perspective with otherness as an indispensable condition for building an indigenous food identity and food stereotypies recognized as "typical". Tricolor food symbols such as pasta and pizza owe their nationalization, for the most part, to their diffusion and their use as means of cross-border identity negotiation, of enormous economic and self-descriptive value. To the at the same time, the insistence of a migratory precedent of such dimensions as to represent a real e own diaspora (Gabaccia 2000; Fiore 2017) has led to an attention to the food sector American Italian with a markedly historicist imprint. Less attention was paid, from the academic field, towards those symbolic forms that characterize the culinary presence Italian in the contemporary New York scenario. To this end, our work proposes a comparative semiotic analysis of a group of restaurants in the city which, in different ways, they use food and spaces as forms of expression useful for offering different models of Italian style. Far from being isolated units, the restaurants return models of typical Italian similar or in controversy between them and yet, in all cases, in strong reciprocity. The analysis and systematization that here we propose aims to highlight how the commercial catering sector can be considered a sector of cultural offer in all respects, capable of inserting itself in its own ways in the debate on the authenticity of food and national customs. Metropolitan space constitutes, precisely in its being a consumer sphere, a territory of cultural exchange and contrast that it favors the clarification of complex Italian food identities and in constant effort of mutual distinction.