The story of Italian food in America is, in many ways, a story about the color red. There's the wine, the waiters' jackets, the checkered tablecloths, the cherries punctuating the ends of cannoli, and most of all, there's the sauce.

Much of the credit for this redness belongs to the south of Italy: its agricultural and gastronomic embrace of the tomato, for one part; for another, its pervasive poverty and — at the tail end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth — the subsequent flood of emigrants to the United States, who brought their propensity for tomatoes with them.

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Source: http://ny.eater.com/