I never spoke about persecution, and having lived half my life abroad (France, Singapore, Portugal and UK) I know pretty well multiple cuisines and I do appreciate them. I did not post the above lacking understanding of how different cuisines have different stories to tell. However I do feel that your comment is just a dismissal based on a partial understanding of my previous post.
Italy is particularly interesting for being regional and so is India, for example. Chinese cuisine I would not even call regional so far apart are the different cooking styles.
French cuisine is also regional but way more uniform than Italian cooking.
Keep in mind that Italy has not been a united country for long at all, and for example people from different regions speak different languages (there are 4 official languages in Italy, but probably at least a dozen spoken recognized languages such as Friulano, Sardo, etc.). Many of our grandparents (if not parents) did not speak Italian as a first language, that came about starting from the 50's with national television and internal migration.
So you can imagine that traditions and cooking are completely different from place to place. For the same reason there are hundreds of types of pasta for example.
>(there are 4 official languages in Italy, but probably at least a dozen spoken recognized languages such as Friulano, Sardo, etc.)
There is only one "official" language (Italian) since 1861.
Each region has its own dialect, that may (or may not) be either very similar to italian or very different from it, that makes more than 12.
You are right that until the '50's and even later, the whole 60's for a large part of the population Italian was a "second language", television started broadcasting in 1954 but it was a "luxury" item and had some diffusion only in the second half of the 60's
German, French and Slovenian are "official" languages in the sense that there are areas where these languages are used by local governments together with Italian. Eg in the Bolzano/Bozen province you can deal with most institutions in German.
Besides Italian, there are 12 officially recognized languages (Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian), four of which are co-official languages (French in Val d'Aosta, Ladin and German in South Tyrol and Slovene in Friuli).
Officially recognized languages can be taught in schools for example, along with Italian. Co-official languages enjoy equal status with Italian, all road signs are bilingual, all official state material is bilinugal, etc.
There is only one official language, Italian and 12 minorities which cultures and languages are officially "protected" or "safeguarded".
That is the essence of the Law 482/99 you cited.
In two border regions (namely Trentino Alto Adige for German and Val d'Aosta for French) the population speaking the "other" language is so vast that there are special provisions that make those regions "bilingual", but in Friuli Slovenian is spoken by a minority and has much less relevance.
Albanian, Catalan, Greek, etc. are spoken by very small commmunities (still coming from the original country where the language is spoken) that "immigrated" in Italy centuries ago, and often they diverge from the "original".
Sardinian is instead a "self-standing dialect", a local historical language of the island, that is "protected", but nothing more (you don't have official state documents written in Sardinian, nor official signs, etc.).
The "tower of babel" (that was a problem in the past) did not came however from those "foreign" languages, after all Italy has century old tradition of trading with France, Germany, etc., but rather from the dialects, and from the lack of schooling/education.
Dialects are local and independent from other European languages (though of course they may well have been influenced from them (take the dialects of Sicily as an example) you can find in it words that clearly come from Spanish or French (or even Arabic).
The people that immigrated to the US obviously largely came from the poorest (and most isolated) regions and the dialect they spoke had very little in common with Italian, a large number of those people couldn't read or write (at least not properly) in Italian and for tens of years, they had no or little contacts with Italy, it is only too normal that words changed in the meantime.
> Italy is particularly interesting for being regional and so is India, for example. Chinese cuisine I would not even call regional so far apart are the different cooking styles.
This separation of cuisines is absolutely true for India as well. Some of the same ingredients are used due to geography with very different spices and preparations.
Italy is particularly interesting for being regional and so is India, for example. Chinese cuisine I would not even call regional so far apart are the different cooking styles.
French cuisine is also regional but way more uniform than Italian cooking.
Keep in mind that Italy has not been a united country for long at all, and for example people from different regions speak different languages (there are 4 official languages in Italy, but probably at least a dozen spoken recognized languages such as Friulano, Sardo, etc.). Many of our grandparents (if not parents) did not speak Italian as a first language, that came about starting from the 50's with national television and internal migration.
So you can imagine that traditions and cooking are completely different from place to place. For the same reason there are hundreds of types of pasta for example.