I’m Italian and can confirm. People even started actually using “standard” Italian(mostly with some remnants of their previous local languages/dialects) in everyday speech only after the inception of TV. The patriot Massimo D’Azeglio said “After making Italy, we need to make Italians”, and the (state controlled) TV did this.
This is also why the stereotypical NJ Italian-American pronunciation of things sounds so unlike Italian.
It’s not that Americans somehow turned “pasta e fagioli” into “pasta fazool”. They turned “pasta e fasule” into “pasta fazool”, which is a much smaller leap.
I’m Italian and can confirm. People even started actually using “standard” Italian(mostly with some remnants of their previous local languages/dialects) in everyday speech only after the inception of TV. The patriot Massimo D’Azeglio said “After making Italy, we need to make Italians”, and the (state controlled) TV did this.
EDIT: It was D’Azeglio, not Garibaldi.
This is also why the stereotypical NJ Italian-American pronunciation of things sounds so unlike Italian.
It’s not that Americans somehow turned “pasta e fagioli” into “pasta fazool”. They turned “pasta e fasule” into “pasta fazool”, which is a much smaller leap.