June 3, 2026
Gelato-gate in the Eternal City
Are You Enjoying Our Linguine? (2025)
Rome serves gelato, the internet serves a full-blown tourist meltdown
TLDR: The essay uses one American family’s intense gelato order in Rome to argue that tourists don’t just visit places—they reshape them. In the comments, people split hard between “this is cultural arrogance” and “please calm down, all tourists do this,” turning dessert into a full-on identity war.
A literary essay about American tourists in Rome somehow turned into a comments-section cage match about empire, manners, and whether asking 30 questions about gelato is charming curiosity or global main-character syndrome. In "Are You Enjoying Our Linguine?", Francesco Pacifico paints a vivid scene: an American family enters a fancy Roman gelateria, gets baffled by words like gianduia and crudista, and refuses to leave until every mystery has been explained. To the author, they’re not just buying dessert—they’re trying to decode and almost redefine the place through sheer enthusiasm.
But readers were not all happily twirling the pasta fork. One camp saw the family as a symbol of American cultural dominance, with one commenter going full historical thunderbolt and comparing today’s tourists to the latest version of a long-running empire. Another crowd rolled their eyes at the whole essay, basically saying: relax, tourists ask dumb questions everywhere, and this isn’t some grand civilizational crisis—it’s just vacation behavior. The harshest reactions were deliciously blunt, including one iconic “What the hell did I just read.”
And yes, the jokes arrived right on schedule. One reader said the piece fits perfectly into the midwit meme, reducing the whole thing to “tourists are dumb and ask dumb questions.” Others treated it like a doom-post about globalization swallowing local culture. So the real drama isn’t the gelato—it’s whether curiosity is cute, colonial, or just unbearably annoying.
Key Points
- •The essay opens with an American family visiting a modern gelateria in central Rome near the Ghetto Ebraico.
- •The shop differs from stereotypical gelaterias by offering a small selection of upscale flavors, educational wall text, and gelato hidden under metal lids.
- •The family remains in the store and asks numerous questions about flavors, ingredients, and terms such as organic and crudista.
- •The article describes the gelateria as a moderately expensive Rome-based franchise with three locations and a one-word name.
- •The essay contrasts the gelateria’s raw-food and ingredient-focused presentation with the author’s description of more traditional Roman cuisine.