I always laugh when I hear this. You don’t have to imagine Italian food without tomatoes, you could just go to Italy. This whole idea that Italian food uses lots of tomato sauce, or tomatoes in general is a very italian-american thing. There’s tons of Italian food, I might even say the majority of, that doesn’t use tomatoes. It’s really only southern Italy that uses tomatoes. That’s why it became so popular. During the migration to America, it was mostly southern Italians (Sicily, Calabria).

Like this meme, the idea that Italians use tomatoes in everything is mostly an American thing.