The Italian Academy of Cooking has launched a scathing attack on the standard of Italian restaurants abroad.
It says two-thirds of the restaurants they reviewed mistook the ingredients or the preparations.
Italians are very proud of their cooking and their recipes, rooted in many different regions and traditions.
But when they travel, most stay well away from Italian food and with good reason: some 60% of Italian restaurants abroad are awful, the academy says. ...
In some takeaway restaurants the classic pizza has mutated into pineapple cocktails and the spaghetti is often a poor stringy impersonation of the real thing, the academy says.
Benito Fiore, who reviewed 320 British Italian restaurants, says only 20 were of a high standard, while 200 were poor.
Mr Fiore says there are very simple reasons why so many are failing.
"The restaurant is not owned by an Italian person. The second chef is usually not Italian," he begins.
"The restaurant manager is not Italian and they don't use mainly Italian produce and they don't serve Italian wines," he adds.
If you haven't seen it, track down the 1996 movie Big Night, about the efforts of two Italian brothers to bring authentic Italian food to 1950s New Jersey.
I particularly like the scene where the maitre'd brother Secondo is trying to explain to an American woman who it is unadvisable to have a side order of spaghetti with her risotto -- and the reaction of his hot-tempered chef brother Primo to her insistence. :)
A quote from Primo about a more commercial competitor's restaurant: "Do you know what happens in that restaurant every night? Rape. RAPE! ...The rape of cuisine."