Italian food typically has a lot less garlic in it and if you had it in any of the classic dishes like ragù alla bolognese or risotto alla milanese it would be surprising. Dishes like spaghetti alla puttanesca or aglio e olio are classic examples where it is used.
Marinara sauce of course has garlic as a key ingredient but this is normally thought of as a Italian-American dish and not something you'd typically find in Italy. Likewise if you had a ragu or risotto in the US you'd probably be surprised if there wasn't garlic in it. And let us not forget that other American invention of garlic bread.
One thing I learned recently was that the typical types of garlic available in the US and Italy are different - softneck and hardneck respectively. Hardneck is a _lot_ more flavourful than softneck which I believe goes a long way to explaining why it's used so much more frequently in the US (and in seemingly incredible quantities).
There's a very good YouTube channel [0] about Italian cooking (In Italian, usually with English subtitles available) where on one episode of chef's reacting to other videos of "Italian cooking" they had a laugh about this stereotype of Italians eating lots of garlic.