@ Alf Romero: One issue with Italy and its attitude toward America is the huge number of Italian-Americans.

World War II cut many ties between Italian-Americans and the "old country," as many people of Italian descent tried to prove they were "200 percent American." But there continued to be many family ties between Italy and America.

While that's much less true today, I think it'd be fair to say that 20, 30, or 40 years ago, there was a good chance that if an American tourist visited an Italian cafe or restaurant, particularly in the southern part of Italy, the tourist might find out that someone in the restaurant, or one of their friends, had a relative in America.

It's harder to hate Americans when your second cousin lives in Chicago.

Most other European nationalities that had large-scale emigration to America had that emigration in the early 1800s, not the late 1800s and early 1900s, as was the case with most Italian emigration, or the Iron Curtain cut off communication in the case of Eastern European emigrants. Germany is a special case -- anti-German hatred, up to and including burnings of churches and schools, happened during World War I so many German-Americans actively rejected their German heritage, and did so a full generation before Italians faced a similar but less serious problem during World War II.