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It’s not something regarding food or cooking habits, but this is a prejudice that made me lough so much that I really want to share it with you. 

Some years ago, my schoolmates and I did a student exchange with some Austrian students. 

In my high-school there was a class (a lab) that was in the underground floor. The window was street-level, so it had a kind of metal gate on the windows just for ordinary safety reasons. 

What one of the students told us was: “in Austria we don’t need this. It’s not like here that you get shot by mafia when you get out the door of your house.” 

For some seconds I was shocked! My goodness!!!! I guess this guy watched too many movies! Nobody shoots us! Going around is not dangerous at all! Come on! It’s Italy, it’s not far West! I asked him who told him this bulls@@t, and he started telling me about one lesson he had a school about mafia during his Italian course. In that moment I begun laughing. I tried to stop because I noticed his disease, but it wasn’t easy, even because he went on on this theme.  

The next question he made us was if we know the Beati Paoli. He was quite disappointed we didn’t. It was a mafia family he heard about at school, so we all should know them because, according to another diffused commonplace, in Italy we all know each other and we are all relatives and neighbors (in the future I’ll share with you some adventures about this too). 

Actually – I checked on Wikipedia because I really never heard about them – this mafia family is a family whose existence isn’t even sure. There are some literary references of them in the Middle Ages. So who can know them? LOL 

It’s funny that abroad there is this idea of mafia soooooooooooooo far from reality. It’s more linked to movies like The Godfather.