Today, we Italians are led to believe that street food is a trend imported from America, where food trucks transformed into traveling kitchens or small carts selling hot dogs are a fundamental part of the U.S. dining scene, becoming a quintessential element of urban landscapes.

In reality, eating pre-cooked food on the streets was the norm in Italian cities from antiquity until the late 1700s—about two thousand years during which most urban residents rarely cooked at home and instead bought ready-to-eat meals, preferably consumed immediately and without utensils, which few people owned.