They call them “meatballs”, and in fact they’re quite popular here too.

But certainly not on the pasta with tomato sauce, except in some old-fashioned recipes.
Even my mom, when I was little, added meatballs in the sauce (thank you, mum), but a single experience is not enough to make a trend.

No restaurant would never serve pasta with meatballs (except for some areas of Abruzzo, where meatballs in sauce are typical).

It’s so far from what we’ve seen in Lady and the Tramp … Many in the United States believe that the “spaghetti meatballs” are a typical Italian dish because they had seen prepared by migrant women in the early twentieth century by poor poor southern Italian regions.

Thanks to I tre forchettieri