CHAPTER EIGHT SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO ITALY: UPDATING THE DEBATE ABOUT AMERICANIZATION PAOLO PRATO With a few exceptions, until the middle of the twentieth century American culture was of little interest to the rest of the world. But then, complementing the global reach of America’s power in the Cold War, American popular culture spread like wildfire as mass media, tourists, businessmen, soldiers, scholars, and other agents of dissemination fostered a widespread acquaintance with American ways. Hollywood became even more dominant, solidifying and expanding a global primacy that had already been established in the interwar period; American TV programming was similarly ubiquitous; American popular music, particularly rock and its successors, could be heard everywhere sung in English, further cementing the status of English as the global lingua franca. As one historian has argued, “U.S. artists, from Louis Armstrong to Frank Zappa, from Ray Charles to Marilyn Monroe (not to mention their animated compatriots, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck) did more to win sympathies for ‘the American way of life’ than any U.S. politician or military leader.” (Ninkovich 2014, 226) Christianity is the most followed religion in the world, with 2.4 billion believers and Italy with its 54 million adherents is the country with the tenth largest Christian population, but third in Europe after Russia and Germany 1 . It is no wonder that Christmas today is the global festival par excellence (Miller 1993). However, what makes this holiday celebrated even in non- Christian countries is not (only) its devotional appeal but its restyling into a 1 http://www.countryranker.com/top-10-countries-with-largest-christian-population/ Accessed 25 October 2018