10 Italian Street Sandwiches Your Grandmother Never Brought to America

In America they call it an Italian sandwich. Five kinds of meat, lettuce, oil, vinegar, stacked so high you have to press it down before you can bite. It is a good sandwich. But in Italy, nobody has ever seen it. I'm Franco. I'm 69, I grew up in a kitchen in Naples, and most of my life I have eaten standing up, in the street, from a piece of paper. Today I take you around Italy. Ten sandwiches, ten regions, the ones people eat every day and nobody ever wrote down. Some of them are four hundred years old. One of them was invented in 1983 by a man staring at leftover pizza dough. And almost none of them crossed the ocean. We go from Turin to Palermo: the tramezzino in the old cafés, the piadina from the roadside stands in Romagna, the puccia with whole olives baked into the bread, the panuozzo from Gragnano, porchetta cut from a whole pig out of the back of a van, and then the last three — the ones most Americans say no to. Tripe for breakfast in Calabria. A cow's stomach in a paper napkin in Florence. And in Palermo, the oldest and the strangest of them all. When your family left, they could not bring everything. They brought what travelled, and what could be made with what America had. The rest stayed behind, on a street corner, being sold every morning to people who never left. So here is my question, and I really want to know. Which region did your family come from? Just the name of the town, if you know it. And if you know the sandwich from there, tell me — I left out ten regions and somebody is going to be angry with me. If you like the real Italian way, subscribe and sit at my table. #italianfood #streetfood #italianamerican