In the first century of Italian-American cuisine, nothing north of Naples mattered. The vast majority of the Italian immigrants who migrated to this country in the late 1800s and early 1900s came from their motherland's hot and impoverished south, a land of red sauce made from heat-loving San Marzano tomatoes and mozzarella from the milk of indigenous water buffaloes.

So America came to love pizza, capicola, calzones, limoncello and rich, creamy desserts. Only in Alex P. Keaton's America did the more restrained fare of the north start coming into vogue—risotto, prosciutto, panna cotta, fontina, Asiago.

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Source: http://www.wweek.com/