stromboli
stromboli
Italian
“A Pennsylvania sandwich took its name from a Rossellini film and a volcano.”
The stromboli sandwich was created around 1950 in the United States, and its name came not from Italian culinary tradition but from a Roberto Rossellini film. Stromboli (1950), starring Ingrid Bergman, was a sensation: a European art film shot on a volcanic island north of Sicily, released the same year Bergman left her husband to marry Rossellini. The film's title was everywhere in American newspapers in 1950. That same year, Nazzareno Romano opened Romano's Italian Restaurant in Essington, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, and named a new rolled sandwich after the film.
The Essington stromboli is a cylinder of rolled pizza dough filled with Italian meats and cheeses: salami, ham, pepperoni, provolone, mozzarella. Unlike a calzone, which is folded in half and sealed at the edges, a stromboli is rolled into a log like a jellyroll and sliced crosswise after baking. Romano claimed the invention and the name in 1950. The dish spread through southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s before moving into American-Italian restaurant menus nationally.
The island of Stromboli has been an active stratovolcano for at least two thousand years. Ancient Greeks called it Strongyle, meaning the round one, for its near-circular profile. The modern name descends through medieval Latin. The island has about four hundred permanent residents and produces small eruptions nearly continuously. Rossellini chose it for its dramatic visual qualities, and the film's international release made the island name widely recognizable outside Italy for the first time.
The connection between the American sandwich and the Italian island is entirely nominal. The dish does not come from the island, uses no ingredients associated with it, and bears no resemblance to any traditional Sicilian preparation. The name was chosen for its sound and its cultural resonance in 1950 America. This kind of naming was standard in mid-century Italian-American restaurant culture, where dishes were often named for places, films, and public figures rather than for any culinary lineage.
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Today
Stromboli today is a fixture of American pizza restaurant menus, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic states. It appears in school cafeterias, sports arenas, and chain restaurants. The rolled format has proved adaptable: vegetarian, breakfast, and dessert versions all exist. The volcanic island, for its part, erupts several times a day and appears in geophysics literature rather than cookbooks.
The Rossellini film is still taught in film schools; the island is still active; Romano's is still open in Essington; the sandwich is still on the menu. Three objects share one name, each carrying no knowledge of the others. The word stromboli belongs to all of them equally, and to none of them originally.
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