The Second-Most Italian Country in the World

I was watching an old Argentinian film yesterday, and I had this funny insight -- this is the 2nd-most Italian country in the world. Next to Italy, of course.

This movie was a riot. It must have been from the very late fifties or more likely early sixties. At first I thought it was Italian, maybe a Fellini movie or one of his imitators. There was all kinds of wackiness going on, lots of interpersonal drama and a bunch of obvious, goofy stuff, like people getting left behind when a car pulls off, and a woman getting stuck at the waist in a porthole on a ship. And there was great music playing all along, very sixties Italian style, the kind of swinging-sixties-meets-circus-music you would expect in Fellini movies from that period.

But what really made me think it was an Italian movie was that it sounded totally Italian, the people sounded like they were speaking Italian. It took a minute or so before I started recognizing spanish words, and it took another minute or two before I was sure they were actually speaking spanish. But the accent was crazy, it was so very, very Italian. Now, generally people notice that Argentinian spanish has an italian influence, a kind of sing-song quality that other spanish accents lack. It's really one of the nice, unique things about the country, a musical quality to the language, much like Italian has. But in this movie, from Argentina forty or fifty years ago, it was even more pronounced.

This got me thinking -- sixty, eighty, a hundred years ago, or whenever the big Italian influx really got going, I'll bet the accent was even more like Italian, and the vocabulary borrowed even more from Italian. And probably since then it evolved closer to 'normal' latin american spanish. Certainly, if this movie was an indication, the spanish spoken here now is closer to the norm than the spanish from forty or fifty years ago.

I asked my spanish teacher about this today, and she totally agreed. Argentinian spanish has a big italian influence, and it was even stronger a few decades back. She said she could hear the difference in old argentinian movies as well.

Of course there are lots of other things that show the country's Italian heritage. They do say, by the way, that roughly 50% of the country has Italian roots, and 40% Spanish, though I haven't really validated that. Lord knows the Italians brought their ice cream. The ice cream here is to die for, as good as Italy it seems to me, and as common as in Italy. It seems that most of it, if not all of it, is the soft gelato style common in Italy too.

The italians brough a lot of other food here as well, though the quality did not seem to travel all that well. There's Italian food everywhere -- they say the three big foods here are the 3 P's: Pasta, Pizza, and Parilla (grilled meats). I'm sure there's good Italian food to be found somewhere, but most of it seems pretty mediocre, if not downright bad. They do not seem to have discovered "al dente" pasta -- everywhere it seems a bit overcooked, much like in the US until ten or fifteen years ago. And the pizza, god, it's terrible, like something you'd get in a bus station in a small town where there are no other options. Some of it is OK, but that's pizza that's known as being great. I think they have cheese problems here, they seem to have very little good cheese. But the pizza has terrible sauce too, and typically not enough of it. This is a big mystery, why a country with so many Italians has such bad pizza.

Earlier yesterday, before I saw the movie on TV, I was riding my new bike around, and I rode by a restaurant called "La Nonna Rosa". Maybe I should try this restaurant, to see what kind of Italian Food Nonna Rosa can whip up.

Update: One of the most obvious Italian accent influences you hear in Buenos Aires comes with the word "bueno", which is pretty damn common. In addition to meaning "good", people use it like "well" or "ok", as a way to introduce a sentence. "Bueno, I wouldn't mind going to a movie." And sometimes, especially in this drawn-out usage, people pronounce it with a really, really strong italian accent -- "boo-eno", almost like the italian "buono". I swear, sometimes they say "buono".