Pizza, the Italian food par excellence, has very ancient origins: various types of flatbreads and focaccias made from cereals, water and sometimes yeast, baked in wood-fired ovens, were already eaten before Christ in Egypt, Greece and ancient Rome.
The word "pizza" is attested as early as the early Middle Ages, probably derived from the Arabic "pita", a soft round flatbread. It did not yet refer to a specific food, but to various kinds of flatbread, sweet or savoury, cooked in different ways. In this period the Lombards, settling in southern Italy, brought with them herds of water buffalo, which would provide the milk for mozzarella, a key ingredient of today's pizza.
Before the discovery of America, this speciality was topped with lard, cheese, basil, garlic, pepper and anchovies. Later, a version with tiny fish, available to fishermen, also appeared.
The tomato, without which we can hardly imagine pizza today, arrived in southern Italy from Peru in the 1500s, but it was almost two centuries before it was used to top pizza.
From the 1700s, pizza became a permanent part of the daily habits and diet of Neapolitans: baked in wood-fired ovens or fried in the open air, it was brought directly to customers by a shop boy carrying a small stove on his head to keep it warm. Towards the end of the century, the custom of eating pizza at the bakeries where it was baked also spread. The first indoor pizzerias appeared, with the characteristic marble counter, ingredients on display, an open oven, tables and a window displaying the pizzas.
The first pizzeria of which we have certain information is the "Port'Alba" pizzeria, founded in 1830, later a haunt of famous artists and writers.
Pizza spread throughout the rest of Italy after the Second World War, particularly in the 1960s, with southern migration to the "industrial triangle" of Turin-Milan-Genoa: first prepared at home for private consumption, then spreading outside with the opening of pizzerias, pizza became so successful that today there are more pizzerias in the North than in the South of Italy!
Today pizza is made and eaten all over the world, but it all started in Naples, and it is all reborn in a handful of flour, yeast, water and plenty of imagination.
