This article employs a transnational perspective to examine the relationship between food and drink consumption by Italians in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Italy's process of nation-building. The phenomena of emigration and colonisation were often interlinked, especially after Italy's defeat at Adua, Ethiopia, in 1896. This threw prime minister Francesco Crispi's form of colonialism into crisis and launched a different approach, based on the creation of a ‘Greater Italy’: a sort of Commonwealth based on cultural and economic ties between the Kingdom of Italy and Italian communities abroad. They were asked to be the bridgehead for Italy's economic and cultural expansion by consuming its exports, especially food and drink products. This required the development of shared feelings of national belonging among the emigrants, by breaking down the local identities that still prevailed and were particularly evident in the sphere of diet, as well as in religion, social life and language. The article analyses the promotional material that reflected the drive to foster Italian national sentiment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which helped to create an Italy both within and outside national borders.

In 1961 the peace activist and anti-mafia campaigner Danilo Dolci spoke at a protest event at the Italian centennial of unification celebrations hosted by the City of Philadelphia. The reactions to the talk he gave on development initiatives in Western Sicily provide some insight into the transnational discussion that was developing around the mafia, governance and leadership in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dolci and his supporters made the suggestion that the problems encountered by the post-war governments in Italy, Sicily and Philadelphia were a result of leaderships which presented or made the appearance of change but did not fix the underlying problems. This article maps how the conversation developed, why the idea of the mafia as a ‘thing’, an operating criminal organisation with Sicilian origins, was such an important narrative, and what it meant for those trying to make a claim to leadership positions.