ROME — When I lived, worked and ate criminal quantities of pasta here just a decade and a half ago, Italians loved America. Not uniformly, of course, and not unconditionally. Like all relationships, ours had issues. Italians found America arrogant, because it is. America rolled its eyes at the sloppy soap opera of Italian politics, because who wouldn’t?

But still I thought that we were in it for the long haul — for better, for worse, for McDonald’s, for mozzarella. Turns out that we weren’t in it for Donald Trump, for Vladimir Putin or for the swelling of nationalist sentiments that put old ways and old alliances up for grabs.

“It’s a different Europe from when you were here in 2004,” Maurizio Molinari, the editor in chief of the Italian newspaper La Stampa, told me a few days ago. “It’s a world apart.”

It’s an Italy apart — that’s for sure. The big victors in the elections here one week ago were the relatively new, ideologically vague, anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which got the most votes by a wide margin, and the far-right, ferociously anti-immigrant League, which exponentially improved its standing from just a few years ago.