"The Italian Bob" is the eighth episode of the seventeenth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons.
Serving as a sequel to "The Great Louse Detective", it features Kelsey Grammer in his ninth appearance as Sideshow Bob and is the first time the Simpsons visit Italy.
Frink won the Writers Guild of America Award for Television: Animation for his script to this episode.
After a huge wheel of mortadella lands on their car and crushes the hood, they push it into a small fictional Tuscan village called Salsiccia (sausage), and are told that the mayor speaks English.
Bob has resisted all intention of killing Bart, and introduces the Simpsons to his wife, Francesca Terwilliger, and his son, Gino.
Lisa spots a bus with a poster advertising Krusty the Clown's performance in the opera Pagliacci.
Bob, Francesca, and Gino find them and corner them on the stage while Krusty flees through a trap door.
[2] Ryan J. Budke of TV Squad said the episode was funny but did not like the abrupt ending with Sideshow Bob singing.
Canning wrote that the episode "falls lowest in the ranking for a few reasons, but the biggest of these is the fact that Bob had no intention of killing Bart.
All the things we love about a Sideshow Bob episode—the vengeance, the familiar settings and characters, the elaborate scheming—were missing from this half-hour.
[7] This marks the third time a credited guest star for the show has won an Emmy, the other two being Marcia Wallace and Jackie Mason although Wallace and Mason both won theirs as a joint win with the rest of the main cast the first time the category was awarded in 1992.