The Multi-Sited/Synesthetic Taste of the Italian ‘Tricolore’: Time-Space Transmutations of the Italian Flag’s Colors Through the Ingredients of Pizza Margherita

The essay analyzes the history of the Italian Tricolore and its synesthetic transmutation in culinary symbols, specifically Pizza Margherita. The process of this inter-semiotic transduction of the Italian national flag involved, as its semiotic means, the unbalanced and, in many respects, discriminatory geo-political strategy that gave rhythm to the Unification of Italy in 1861. The ambiguous significance of Pizza Margherita, simultaneously a symbol of national reconciliation and of the cultural identitarian edge between the North and South of the country, is connoted, furthermore, by the geographically widespread origins of its ingredients. These global roots constitute a sort of prophecy of the subsequent planetary dissemination of this recipe and the transfigurations of its Italian-ness along the routes travelled by Italian migrants. The synesthetic shifting of the Italian Tricolore performed the role of vehicle of re-semantization in foreign lands, and distinctly in the USA. It re-enacted the ethnic-political conflict epitomized in the colors of the flag so as to produce a geo-political continuum with the homeland, dramatically conveyed by the mediation of Cosa Nostra in its collaboration with Allied Forces landing in Sicily during the Second World War. All the subsequent history of Italy and its relationships with the US have been influenced by this semio-spatial continuity going so far as to change the current political signification of the Tricolore for all Italians.