The history of pizza 

Between myths, legends and traditions. The pizza... A great love for everyone. Let's face it: a week without pizza is a week that lacks something. When you decide to eat pizza on the weekend, from Monday you wait for it and count all the days that separate you from it. Pizza is more than just a food, it is the emblem of Italian taste, where simple and different ingredients meet to give a unique flavor. It is perfect for lunch and dinner. And so it is that while biting into a slice of pizza you tell yourself that we should make a monument to the inventor of pizza, to the man who created such a perfect food.

Surely you will have your favorite pizza, you will know the rules to prepare it to perfection and during your life you will have eaten it hundreds of times. But do you also know the history of the most famous Italian dish in the world?  At the beginning of the '900 pizza was sold only in Naples and in some small place in Little Italy, where our emigrants tried to repeat it but not with the same characteristics (mozzarella was unknown in the States). It was immediately after the war that it spread abroad, to become one of the cult of world cuisine; So much so that there is no foreigner who comes to our area, who does not eat pizza at least once, a sort of recognition of paternity.

Tradition, however, has it that in 1889 the pizza maker "don" Raffaele Esposito prepared 3 pizzas for King Umberto I and Queen Margherita visiting Naples, and that the queen literally went crazy for that mozzarella and basil tomato (the colors of our Italian flag) so much so that she agreed to give it her name. So far the history, perhaps a bit romanticized of one of the most famous foods in the world, but pizza, the one as we understand it today, was born almost a century and a half before, apparently in 1730 with a seafood taste (Pomodoro garlic oil and oregano) and immediately spread to all social classes until the beginning of the 800 when the traditional pizza Margherita (noble variant) was born.

Of course, tradition is counterbalanced by myths and legends that pizza cannot escape. Some trace the origin of pizza to more than 3000 years ago in ancient Egypt where it seems that the population on the occasion of the celebrations for the pharaoh ate a kind of pizza vaguely resembled a flatbread type unleavened bread; The Greeks and Romans themselves ate focaccia of various types in many cases based on spelt. Mythology traces pizza back to Venus who one day prepared for her husband Vulcan pieces of dough garnished with berries and aromatic herbs (but we know Venus was more inclined to entertainment than to cooking).

Even in the Renaissance it seems that women served pizza on the table, but given the time, the latter was more tending to sweet than salty. Of one thing we are certain: pizza is the daughter of the peoples who overlook the Mediterranean, thanks also to the type of basic ingredients that compose it, in the same way that, beyond myths, legends and traditions, "Pizza and Naples" are an inseparable combination together with sun, sea, mandolin and the innate art of inventing the people of the Neapolitan alleys.