[diego_moita]

In a sense "Americans" don't really exist.

The people the article describes are a very small subset of the American cultures: the ones with intellectual curiosity and money to travel to another country.

For each American tourist you see in Europe there are at leas a dozen, back in the U.S., that don't travel, don't have curiosity for a foreign culture or don't even have any curiosity at all.

And, then, what moral grounds do Europeans have to talk about "invasion" or "imperialism"? The golden eras of Europe where built on exactly that. At least they're conquering you with dollars, not guns. The 3rd world European colonies of 19th century weren't that lucky.

You know what this article smells like? It is typical European insularity. Europe is still a continent with people that spent the last 3000 years in wars among themselves. Actually, Italians only stopped wars against other Italians on the 19th century, after unification.

[nemomarx]

The author talks about the Roman and Renaissance eras specifically during this, so I don't think he would disagree that they have previously done the empire and colonizing stuff. He even says maybe that's why Italy attracts so many tourists on purpose, right?