Vulgar allusions to sexuality LANDLADY [Italian: Tutto si sfascia, cara mia.

L'unica cosa che rimane, è la famiglia.] You're not married?

[Dialect: Eh, tutto se sfascia, fija mia. L'unica cosa che rimane, è 'a famija]. Tu non sei sposata?

LIZ [Italian: No, divorziata.] No, sono divorziata. LANDLADY [Italian: perchè divorziata?] E perché divorziata? LIZ [Italian: rotto--] We broke it. Rotto..abbiamo rotto. LANDLADY You're more happy now? [Italian:

Io ho una regola. Ogni uomo che viene qui, non si ferma a dormire la notte! Voi ragazze americane, quando venite in Italia, volete solo pasta] and sausage!

E sei più felice, adesso? Io ho una regola: ogni uomo che viene qui, non si ferma a dormire la notte! Voi ragazze americane, quando venite in Italia, cercate solo pasta [Dialect: je sausizza]!

The role which is given to food in this scene is extremely important. When Liz visits her future house in Rome for the first time, she comes up against some die-hard beliefs: her future landlady, an old woman in her eighties, is astonished when she hears that Liz is not only single, but even divorced. The old lady makes her opinion about this matter clear in her first utterances. For her, marriage is the only thing that survives the destructive action of time; being a wife is a necessary condition for reaching happiness and, implicitly, a value of utmost importance for women. With her reference to the value of marriage, the landlady indirectly recalls a not too distant past, when men and women had fixed roles and the latter were wives, mothers, domestic workers and cookers at the same time. This structure represented for centuries a guarantee of security and stability, both for society and for the individual. Escaping from this ‘idyllic’ reality is negatively regarded by the landlady. The use of an intrusive, accusatory and even moralising tone of voice in the utterances ‘‘You’re not married?’’ and ‘‘you’re more happy now?’’ implicitly outlines her personal opinions according to which women can be grouped in two categories. Her words seem to suggest that, on the one hand, there are those women who adhere to the traditional roles of wife and mother, while, on the other, there are those who choose alternative routes. The latter are negatively alluded with

the last cue and by the expression ‘‘pasta and sausage’’, with appeals to the domain of food in order to negatively discriminate them. The former word, ‘‘pasta’’, indicates the genuine appreciation of Italian food shown by foreigners, but the latter, ‘‘sausage’’, has a more subtle sexual connotation. For its tube-shape, a sausage recalls the male sexual organ; that, together with the landlady's eloquent gesture, expresses criticism for Liz's divorce, as if breaking off a relationship were only aimed at having sexual freedom and being non-married would immediately classify a woman as licentious.

It is not the first time that Liz is implicitly (or explicitly) disapproved of for her desire to undertake a year-long journey abroad, but it is in Italy that she finds the largest number of indirect criticisms for her lifestyle, especially from the elderly. Through food-related expressions and images which show the preparation of food, the average Italian elder is depicted as a narrow-minded person who sticks to an anachronistic vision of life.

This dialogue, which has been developed from an American point of view, seems to convey the message that all Italians have these convictions; hence, we are in presence of a double stereotype. On the one hand, women are seen as abnormal and almost depraved if they do not respect the ‘conventional’ feminine role; on the other hand, Italians are stereotyped as narrow- minded and sexist people. Actually, if this kind of considerations on the feminine role is still deeply rooted in the Italian Catholic culture and in the most ardent supporters of Catholicism, the present dialogue (and also the following one) tends to voluntary generalise the situation and to attribute these ideas to all Italians, which creates a false stereotype.

A remarkable contribution to the expression of this double stereotype is given by the different linguistic strategies which characterise the English and the Italian scripts. In English, the landlady’s speech is marked by English-Italian code-switching. The passage from one language to another is not performed casually, yet it is specifically aimed at reinforcing the stereotype about Italians. In fact, the utterances which hint at the solidity of marriage and at the women’s task of creating a family are in standard Italian, as well as the preconception that a woman who refuses to behave in a certain way is necessarily a woman of loose morals. In the dubbed version, the alternation of English and Italian would be unsuitable, thus the pragmatic effect of code switching in the original dialogue has been reproduced with other means. Firstly, the original sentences which were uttered in standard Italian have been dubbed

has been partially modified by the use of code-mixing between Italian and the Sicilian dialect, becoming ‘‘pasta je sausizza’’. The dialectal component is extremely eloquent, thus it is immediately capable of vulgarly hinting at sexuality. As for the choice of using a Southern Italian accent instead of the Roman one, it seems inappropriate and inaccurate. However, this linguistic choice can be justified as a means to make the stereotype more credible. In fact, in the same way as Americans believe that all Italians are extremely strict and prejudiced about sex and morality, on average Italians consider people from the South of Italy as more conservative, especially about the role of women and their relation with marriage and sexuality. The decision of using this specific linguistic variety is extremely functional for reproducing the sexual stereotype, thus attributing the original preconception about Italians to Sicilians.

To sum up, in this scene this double stereotype is conveyed through two different linguistic varieties depending on the intended audience. The English script uses standard Italian: the audience would not be capable of assigning a particular value to one or another Italian regional dialect, and the stereotype is rooted in the Italian culture in general. The Italian script, instead, could not reduce the meaningful alternation between Italian and English to a flat, standard Italian variety, that is why the translator drew upon a specific Southern Italian accent and on shared preconceptions about Southern people in order to obtain the same effect as the original on the audience.