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STATEN ISLAND, NY -- With the history of Italy spanning more than 3,000 years, Italian style and design have become world renowned in everything from art, classic architecture and contemporary fashion to fine furniture, fast cars and stylish motorcycles.
   

There will no longer be any confusion over which Manganaro’s store is which. The one that opened 119 years ago on the West Side of Manhattan and became known as Manganaro Grosseria Italiana, or Manganaro Foods, is no more.

New York has enjoyed a spectacular shift in the quality, quantity and variety of its street food in the past five years. Rome, however, has more or less remained wedded to fried rice balls and square pizza slices despite its millennial history of fast and cheap street food.

And yet, when the biannual Mad. Sq. Eats festival opens on Friday, it is a Roman snack that may threaten to upstage its New York counterparts.

Visitors to Florence surely know about Cantinetta Antinori, a restaurant run by the wine company Marchesi Antinori that was called “one of the most attractive gastronomic spots in Firenze” in our last survey of the area. While there are also branches in Moscow, Zurich and Vienna, the eatery has yet to touch down on American soil. That changes on October 3 to October 6, when Isola in the Mondrian SoHo will launch a pop-up edition of the European chain.