The 10 most famous Italian dishes abroad... that are not Italian!

There are many things for which Italy is famous abroad: history, cities, art, fashion, and design. Yet, there is one thing that definitely deserves a special mention... it's the food!

Pasta and pizza are among the engines of Italian tourism. In fact, tourists like to pick the country for its food as well as its art, weather, and history.

But is all this fame really thanks to the Italians themselves? As a matter of fact, there are many "Italian" dishes that tourists look for once they sit at the tables of local Italian restaurants... and that Italians don't even know how to make!
Here's a selection for you...

They are so famous in the world that Disney chose them to seal the most romantic moments of one of its famous animated films: 'Lady and the Tramp.' All around the world, people use a sauce with meatballs to season pasta, but in Italy? Not so much. They usually eat their meatballs separately.

If you think you'll find peppers on a pepperoni pizza, don't hold your breath: in reality, this pizza got its name due to a simple linguistic error. The pepperoni pizza is nothing more than a pizza with spicy salami.

According to the people of Bologna, 'spaghetti alla bolognese' is not a thing. This meal may be one of the clearest examples of an Italian-sounding, non-Italian dish.

Among the specialties considered "very Italian," garlic bread is famous. It's a slightly heavier and definitely more caloric version of the Italian bruschetta, and it doesn't have the tomato that Italians will always eat on it.

Italians do not know this dish, yet it is number one on the menus of Italian restaurants overseas. One thing must be admitted: legend has it that, in reality, the recipe comes from a restaurant in Rome.
Allegedly, a cook named Alfredo served this pasta to a couple of old Hollywood stars, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. They, in turn, helped make it famous in the United States. The recipe is quite simple: in its most basic version, Alfredo pasta is fettuccine with butter and parmesan.

Italian dressing is a condiment used mainly for salads. In general, it contains water, vinegar or lemon juice, vegetable oil, chopped peppers, sugar or corn syrup, and a mix of herbs and spices such as oregano, fennel, dill, and salt. It's nothing like the simple 'oil and vinegar' that Italians tend to sprinkle onto their salads.

This spicy tomato sauce is used to dress pasta or seafood and is based on chili, garlic, and fresh herbs such as parsley and basil. In Italy, people don't know this recipe at all.

People outside of Italy eat parmigiana with chicken instead of eggplant. While the appearance may be similar to that of the original parmigiana, chicken has no place in this dish for Italians.

This is a particularly sore point for the Italian pizza purists: pineapple. And to make things worse, while this dish is called a 'Hawaiian' pizza, it was, in fact, designed by a pizza chef of Greek origin in the Canadian city of Toronto. He began offering his customers 'The Satellite,' an experimental variant of pizza with ham cooked in it.

Some say that this dish should be made only with egg yolks, while others claim it is prepared with whole eggs. Then again, some prefer it with parmesan, and others only with bacon and pecorino. Carbonara is a dish that even Italians themselves do not 100% agree about.
On one thing, however, they are on the same page: the dish in the photo is not a carbonara. Cream, appreciated so much abroad, is not among the original meal's ingredients.

A particularly heretic thing to do, according to Italians, is to order a cappuccino at the end of a meal. There's nothing less Italian than that. Cappuccino is a drink for breakfast only.

Italians care so much about their delicacies that they become almost uncompromising when it comes to their cuisine. They love good food, and perhaps they even are a little obsessed with it. Especially with traditional recipes.

Italians themselves are the first to admit that they often inadvertently think, "It's not like that!" or get carried away by a nostalgic "Ahhh, how my grandmother used to make them..." - even when they just have a simple plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce in front of them.

Whether their first reaction to a meal is positive or negative, at least we can say that Italians' thoughts about Mama's kitchen form an association between food and family. And that is why Italians remind us that food, before anything else, is a form of love... whatever recipe we may decide to follow.