For many readers today, the idea of “American influence” in Italy belongs to a familiar timeline, which begins after the Second World War, with soldiers, films, chewing gum, jeans, and the Marshall Plan. Yet a recently published study invites us to move the clock back several decades.
Long before Hollywood, jazz, or Coca-Cola became shorthand for cultural exchange, Italians were already debating, welcoming, mistrusting, and imitating what they understood as “America.” The book in question is The Rise of Americanism in Italy, 1888–1919, by Luca Cottini (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2025).
