Pizza’s History
Pizza has 3000 years of history.
All civilizations, it can be said, have known different forms of focaccia, flatbreads and the like which saw in the mixture of various kinds of cereal flour, water and the most varied condiments a source of fundamental nourishment in human nutrition.
The antiquity close to us, the one that saw the flourishing of the civilizations that overlooked the Mediterranean Sea therefore offers a wide variety of examples of what can be considered the ancestors of pizza as we know it.
From Egypt to classical Greece to ancient Rome and Pompeii, there is therefore a whole proliferation of foods that recall pizza in the composition and cooking.
The Lombards who came to southern Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire had brought with them the buffalo which, once settled between Lazio and Campania, will provide the milk for the manufacture of mozzarella.
And in the modern era, the discovery of the New World will bring to Europe a main element of pizza that is almost impossible to imagine without it: the tomato.
After the initial suspicions, the tomato made its triumphal entry into Italian cuisine, and in Neapolitan cuisine in particular.
But it was between the 1700s and 1800s that pizza became increasingly popular as one of the people’s favorite dishes of Neapolitan cuisine.
In the 1700s pizza was packaged in wood-fired ovens to be then sold in the streets and alleys of the city: a shop boy who balanced the stove on his head, brought the pizzas directly to the buyers, already packaged with different ingredients and condiments, after having warned them of their arrival with loud and characteristic calls.
At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the habit of tasting pizza also began to take place at these ovens as well as on the street or at home, a sign of the growing favor that this food was now enjoying a full right in the diet of the people. Neapolitan: the pizzeria was born in the form that we know and the so-called “physical” and “environmental” characteristics of the pizzeria as we know it are being defined.
The current shape of the pizza dates back to the early nineteenth century, when the tomato became the protagonist of this dish, although many other types of toppings were experimented starting at the end of the eighteenth century. In Naples, pizzas were prepared and sold on the street by itinerant pizza chefs.
The first ovens were built in bricks, then in volcanic stone, the only materials that allowed to reach temperatures essential for the success of the pizza.
We are, exactly, in 1889. That summer King Umberto I with Queen Margherita spent in Naples, in the palace of Capodimonte, as required by a certain rule of the monarchy, to make an act of presence in the ancient kingdom of the two Sicilies.
On that occasion, the chef Raffaele Esposito prepares some pizzas for the royals on the visit. Among the different types that are offered, the royal couple prefers the one topped with tomato, mozzarella, and basil which, perhaps not surprisingly, are the colors of the Italian flag. When Raffaele is asked the name of this delight, he does not hesitate for a moment: love for the queen and a certain amount of cunning make him exclaim “Margherita!”. The most famous of the Neapolitan pizzas is officially born.
Although the one just narrated is by far the best known version of events, it is very likely that it is just a fascinating legend: recent studies would in fact indicate that pizzas very similar to Margherita were present in Naples well before the queen’s visit.
