Argentina is also a strongly Italophilic country as cuisine, fashion and lifestyle has been sharply influenced by Italian immigration.

[9] During the Spanish conquest of what would be present-day Argentine territory, an Italian Leonardo Gribeo, from the region of Sardinia, accompanied Pedro de Mendoza to the place where Buenos Aires would be founded.

[13] The Italian immigrants were primarily male, aged between 14 and 50 and more than 50% literate; in terms of occupations, 78.7% in the active population were agricultural workers or unskilled laborers, 10.7% artisans, and only 3.7% worked in commerce or as professionals.

[27] Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, emigration from Italy was largely due to conditions of widespread poverty, high demographic pressure and heavy taxation,[8] while Argentina was a country with a strong need for immigrants.

[6] Most of the Italians who initially moved to Argentina were farmers from the north, originating from regions such as Piedmont, Liguria, Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Lombardy.

[35] Immigrants from northern Italy settled mainly in rural areas, while those from the south preferred large cities.

[38] Of the immigrants who arrived between 1876 and 1915, 16.9% were from Piedmont, 13.2% from Calabria, 11.1% from Sicily, 10.4% from Lombardy, 8.2% from Marche, 7.5% from Campania, 7.2% from Veneto and 3.2% from Abruzzo and Molise, which then constituted a single region.

[37] In Argentine slang, tano (from Napulitano, "Neapolitan") is still used for all people of Italian descent although it originally meant inhabitants of the former independent state the Kingdom of Naples.

[39][40] According to a 1990 study, the high proportion of returnees can show a positive or negative correlation between regions of origin and of destination.

[3] A group of Italian-Albanians, belonging to the Italo-Albanian Catholic Church and worshipping according to the Byzantine Rite, are present in Luis Guillón, in the Esteban Echeverría Partido in the Buenos Aires Province.

[45] Italian immigration to Argentina was markedly urban, with the exception of the province of Santa Fe, where agricultural colonies predominated.

The main settlement was the La Boca district of Buenos Aires, where Italians represented 80% of the merchants and 70% of the employees.

[46] In 1914, Buenos Aires had more than 300,000 inhabitants born in Italy, which represented 25% of the total population of the capital[13] and 60% of the Italian immigration in all of Argentina.

[10] There, the Italian community was integrated into Buenos Aires society through institutions, schools, churches, newspapers and political groups.

[47] Immigrants from northern Italy settled in highly populated regions of the country such as the provinces of Santa Fe, Córdoba and Mendoza, where they found better job opportunities.

Di Giovanni's trial aroused some anti-Italian sentiments, motivated above all by the fear of attacks on the Argentine state by Italian anarchists.

[53] According to the anthropologist Stefania Pedrini of the University of Rome La Sapienza, this cultural influence is due to the fact that "at the end of the 19th century Argentina was a new nation, which did not have a defined identity, and in which the grandeur European immigration has influenced the construction of a national being, through a policy of very strong cultural syncretism."

[12] The main one was La Patria degli Italiani ("The homeland of the Italians"), which in turn was the third most important in Argentina, with a circulation of 14,000 copies.

[61] The sounds of the lunfardo feeds mainly from the languages of Italy, especially the northern ones, because in Buenos Aires the Italian colony is very extensive and has left onomasiology and terminology a vast lexical heritage.

Here are some examples: Between about 1880 and 1900, Argentina received a large number of peasants from the South of Italy, who arrived with little or no schooling in Spanish.

As the immigrants strove to communicate with the local criollos, they produced a variable mixture of Spanish with Italian languages and dialects, specially Neapolitan.

Sorrentinos are also a local dish with a misleading name (they do not come from Sorrento but were invented in the Rio de La Plata region).

[65] It is believed that sorrentinos are a local derivation of the Italian ravioli capresi,[66] whose dough is instead elaborated with flour, water and olive oil, while the filling is made with caciotta cheese, flavoured with oregano.

[67] Most sources point to an Italian immigrant from Sorrento, Rosalía Persico or his son Cayetano Persico, who created this pasta while working in a famous trattoria of Mar del Plata,[65][68][69] while other sources state that they originated in another restaurant in Mar del Plata called Sorrento.

Similar to polenta concia in Italy, it is eaten as a main dish, with sauce and melted cheese, or it may accompany a stew.

[73] Buseca, a Lombard dish made with tripe, beans, tomato puree, carrots and celery, is also popular in Argentina.

[75] A common dish of this variety is the milanesa a la napolitana, an Argentine innovation despite its name, which comes from former Buenos Aires restaurant "Nápoli."

The traditional Italian recipe was not prepared with latticework, unlike in Argentina, but with a lid pierced with molds in the form of hearts or flowers.

[86] The tradition of serving gnocchi on the 29th of each month stems from a legend based on the story of Saint Pantaleon, a young doctor from Nicomedia who, after converting to Christianity, made a pilgrimage through northern Italy.

It tells the story of the long and complicated journey of a 13-year-old boy, Marco, from Genoa, Italy to Argentina, in search of his mother, who had immigrated there two years earlier.