Italians are well-known for being sticklers about the right way to prepare their food, often implying it is ancient. Unless it is a low-oil focaccia or a salad (ancient Roman), it is surprisingly often the case that it is a dish that is 50-100 years old with a foreign influence.

Naples has been making pizza for about 200 years as a basic flatbread with tomatoes, mozarella, and basil. If you eat pizza with a tomato sauce… that’s an American change. Pizza was not often eaten outside Naples [Edit:whoopsie] until around WWII. The most common variations around the world are all based on the American version.

Carbonara was a WWII-era invention with tons of variations at first and an American origin. I’ve known Italians that get actually upset if you prepare carbonara with the “wrong” ingredients even though they were ingredients used on “original” carbonaras less than 50 years ago.

If you go back just a bit farther, every dish that needs tomatoes or potatoes or peppers is from the Americas, not Europe. And Europeans were not big on tomatoes for a looong time. It’s only been in much use there for about 250 years.