From discs of bread cooked on stone to the taverns of Naples, from Queen Margherita to the conquest of a world market worth more than 60 billion euros, through to recognition as a Unesco world heritage. The fascinating history of pizza — the arc of a dish born in poverty and ever richer in history, ingredients, flavours and glory.
The history of pizza has very ancient origins, even though it is only in the last century that the savoury disc of dough, mozzarella and tomato soared into the world's gastronomic pantheon. The custom of placing food on top of a kneaded and cooked flour base is widespread everywhere and in every era. Let us see how, in Italy, it gradually took shape to become the dish that symbolises Italian identity around the world, whose art has just been recognised as a Unesco world heritage.
Agriculture is born. Ten thousand years ago in the Near East, humans begin cultivating selected plant species: emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, legumes and flax. The cooking on stone of porridges made from toasted and ground cereals, or of unleavened bread, dates back to the Lower Neolithic.
The role of the Egyptians in the story of pizza is that of the discoverers of yeast. Through leavening, doughs made from crushed or ground cereals become, after baking, soft, light, more flavoursome and digestible. Bread spreads far and wide.
Today's wheat derives from the Roman variety through selections and crossings among the various types of spelt known at the time. The word "farina" (flour) derives from "far", the Latin name for spelt. Peasants would knead flour ground from wheat grains with water, aromatic herbs and salt, then place this round flatbread to cook on the hearth, in the heat of the ashes. Romans sometimes used discs of bread as plates to hold saucy dishes.
A word from the Germanic languages of Italy (Gothic, Lombard) arrives in Italy with the Lombards: "bizzo-pizzo", from the German "bizzen". Related to the English "bite" and "bit", it means bite. From bite to mouthful, to piece of bread, to flatbread, is a logical progression that linguists call a common process of metonymic transfer — a chain synecdoche.
In the medieval Latin of the Codex cajetanus of Gaeta, a flatbread is called "piza" for the first time. It appears in a lease agreement for a mill on the river Garigliano. The document, preserved in the archive of the cathedral of Gaeta, states that in addition to the rent, the owners were owed "duodecim pizze" each year at Christmas and the same at Easter. Around the year 1000 the term picea also appears — we do not know whether as an alternative or to indicate a different preparation, in the sense of already having the disc of dough covered with colourful and flavoursome ingredients before being sent to the oven. However, the word pizza still denotes in southern Italy today not only the classic pizza — the seasoned flatbread sent to the oven — but also many types of filled and fried dough discs, filled focaccias or similar preparations. Pizza is mentioned again in 1195 in a document from Penne in Abruzzo.
In the medieval Latin of the Roman Curia one reads "in panatteria, scilicet guindalis, pizis, caseo, lignis" and in a 14th-century text from L'Aquila "pissas quatuor et fladonem unum" (the fladone is a typical baked product from Abruzzo and Molise). A "piczas casey, pizzas de pane" appears in a document from Celano dated 1387–88. Attestations rain down from across half of Italy, up to the "piza panis" in the chancery records of Pesaro from 1531.
In his Descrizione dei luoghi antichi di Napoli, the poet and essayist Benedetto Di Falco says that "focaccia, in Neapolitan is called pizza".
The personal cook of Pope Pius V, Bartolomeo Scappi, in his Opera of 1570 mentions pizza for the second time, but it is a sweet made by pounding almonds, pine nuts, dates and fresh figs, and raisins in a mortar, adding rose water, egg yolks, sugar, cinnamon and grape must. The whole mixture was then rolled out into a sheet about three centimetres thick to be baked. In any case, he is the first to link pizza to Naples, and it is still a base on which to place something else. "In this pizza one may put all manner of seasonings," the papal cook specifies.
In the 17th century a delightful Neapolitan little work by Giovan Battista Basile appears, the Cunto de li Cunti — that is, the tale of tales — a series of stories linked one to another in a chain. One of them is entitled "Le due pizzelle", but it is not entirely clear what these are, except that at least one is made with a disc of dough folded over a filling.
The Cunto de li Cunti recites: "Fra tanto, partuto lo marito, essa, ch'era cossì cannaruta come potrona, non attese a d'autro c'a pigliare mappate de farina ed agliare d'uoglio ed a fare zeppole e pizze fritte"
And again in the story of "le due pizzelle": "Ma se me vuoi bene, mamma mia, dammi na pizzella, ca me la voglio magnare a chell'acqua fresca" – and "da dintro no panaro pigliaie na bella pizzella, che lo iuorno 'nante avea fatto lo furno de pane, e la dette a Marziella".
The traditional flatbread of kneaded wheat flour seasoned with garlic, lard and coarse salt continues to find favour among the populations of the South; olive oil takes the place of lard, cheese is added, and aromatic herbs reappear. At the dawn of the 17th century a recipe with the scent of basil makes its appearance — the pizza "alla Mastunicola" (in dialect, of master Nicola). From this point on, basil rises to become a fundamental and prized ingredient of pizza.
It is only in the second half of the 18th century that the use of an exotic berry, imported from the Americas: the tomato, finally spreads into kitchens in Italy. Initially, it was merely a decorative plant.
One must therefore wait until well into the 18th century to see pizza with tomato make its appearance.
The earliest accounts of Neapolitan pizza are traced back to the mid-18th century. Vincenzo Corrado was an Italian cook, philosopher and man of letters. A man of great culture, he was above all a great gastronome and one of the finest cooks to distinguish himself between the 18th and 19th centuries in the noble courts of Naples — a symbol of his time in the varied Neapolitan world. He wrote a remarkable treatise on the eating habits of the city of Naples, Il cuoco galante, in which he observes how it was already the custom among ordinary people to dress pizza and macaroni with tomato.
Pizza is enormously popular among the common people, but barons, princes and rulers disdain it — until the arrival of Ferdinand I of Bourbon, who, an enthusiast of the taverns he would visit in secret, has an immoderate love of pizza. So much so that he had tried on several occasions to introduce it onto the court menus. He therefore decides, in order to let his consort Maria Carolina and the ladies of the court taste it, to have it baked in the kilns of Capodimonte, next to those from which the most precious ceramics emerge. For this purpose he engages the best pizzamaker in the city, Antonio Testa, who becomes monzù (chef of the kingdom).
The first recipe for pizza as we know it today is probably set out in a treatise published in Naples in 1858, which describes the way in which the "true Neapolitan pizza" was prepared in those years. When the city was still the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Francesco De Bourcard wrote in Usi e costumi di Napoli e contorni descritti e dipinti:
Take a piece of dough, spread it out, flatten it with a rolling pin and by beating it with the palms of your hands, season it with oil or lard, bake it in the oven, eat it and you will know what pizza is.
Bourcard goes so far as to cite a kind of proto-Margherita pizza — a Margherita ante litteram — with mozzarella and basil: "Others (pizzas) are covered with grated cheese and dressed with lard, and a few basil leaves are placed on top. Thin slices of mozzarella are added." Tomato is optional: "sometimes it is used," writes the Neapolitan author of Swiss origin. As for the topping, one may use "whatever comes into your head."
Here is the pizzaiolo, "one who makes and sells pizzas, in Naples," as the Zingaretti dictionary of 1922 would meticulously specify. He is introduced to us by the writer Matilde Serao, the first woman to found a newspaper in Italy, among the accounts collected in Napoli d'allora, written with Edoardo Scarfoglio: "The pizzaiolo who has a shop, during the night, makes a great number of these round flatbreads, of a thick dough, which burns but does not cook through, laden with almost raw tomatoes, garlic, pepper and oregano." Here too, Serao recounts the first attempt by pizza to emigrate. A failure!
One day, a Neapolitan entrepreneur had an idea. Knowing that pizza is one of the culinary passions of Naples, knowing that the Neapolitan colony in Rome is very large, he thought of opening a pizzeria in Rome… At first the crowds flocked there; then they dwindled. Pizza, removed from its Neapolitan surroundings, seemed out of place and induced indigestion; its star faded and set, in Rome; an exotic plant, it died amid all that Roman solemnity.
The most widespread legend about the origins of pizza Margherita holds that in June 1889 it was the cook Raffaele Esposito, owner of Pizzeria Brandi, who — at the invitation of royal officials — offered the delicious dish to Queen of Italy Margherita di Savoia, wife of Umberto I. The queen's favourite is said to have been the pizza topped with tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, also chosen to represent the colours of the Italian flag.
Four types of pizza are cooked on that occasion: the white one with lard, basil, pecorino and pepper — known as Mastu Nicola — the tomato, anchovy, garlic, oregano and oil version, the tomato, mozzarella, basil, oil and pecorino version, and the fried calzone with ricotta and cicoli. The first three are cooked in the oven of the Torre farmhouse, a small country cottage inside the royals' private citrus grove at what was then the royal palace — today a museum with woodland.
The classic 1891 work by Pellegrino Artusi, La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, lists three types of pizza — but all three are sweet.
"Federico II, Neapolitan in every respect, liked those coarse foods of which Neapolitans are so fond: salt cod, soffritto, caponata, mozzarella, pizzas," writes Raffaele De Cesare in the historical essay La fine di un regno.
In the Dizionario Moderno published by Hoepli in 1905 — a well-known guide to the thicket of neologisms of the day — Alfredo Panzini writes: "Pizza: common name for an enormously popular Neapolitan dish. It consists of a kind of sheet or flatbread made of heavily leavened flour dough. Sprinkled with tomatoes, fresh cheese, anchovies, etc., to the customer's taste, it is put in the oven where it puffs up and cooks on the spot."
In 1907 the Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana suggests that pizza actually derives from "pinza" (from the Latin pinsere, to press flat). Klein, on the other hand, proposes a borrowing from medieval Greek pita, meaning cake (also related to the Latin adjective piceus). A broadly similar preparation survives in Veneto and Friuli, where the pinza (the etymology of the word is the same, again from Greek pita) is a sweet made from flour and dried fruit, fairly flat and baked in an oven dish.
The collection of regional recipes by food writer Ada Boni, Il talismano della felicità, includes a pizza recipe that calls for exactly the ingredients considered canonical today: mozzarella and tomato.
In the month of May, almost all the veteran Neapolitan pizzaioli draw up a brief specification, signed by all of them and recorded as an official deed by the Naples notary Antonio Carannante.
The Italian parliament precisely establishes the types of flour, yeast, salt and tomatoes permissible in order to authentically define a pizza Margherita. It is also declared that the dough must be worked by hand and that the mozzarella must come exclusively from traditional geographical areas.
From 5 February 2010, pizza is officially recognised as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed by the European Union. During the vote on 9 December 2009 in Brussels, the Polish representatives are the only ones to abstain — a slight that is hard to explain and hard to forget. It may be something in the air or the water, but some say that truly authentic Neapolitan pizza must be savoured in one of the thousands of pizzerias in Naples and its surroundings. The classic is pizza Margherita, with tomato, mozzarella and generous amounts of fresh basil and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. The variant with buffalo mozzarella must be handled with care, as it is a dairy product that releases a great deal of liquid, making the pizza dough soggy. All other variants involving additional ingredients and toppings are not recognised by true Neapolitan pizzaioli, who are fond of saying: "Nun' è cercate sti pizze complicate ca fanno male 'a sacca e 'o stommaco patì" (Don't go looking for elaborate pizzas that are expensive and hard on the stomach).
How could anyone forget the satisfaction on Julia Roberts's face as she savours pizza in the film Eat Pray Love. The "eat" chapter consecrates Italian identity in the fullest sense, and this magnificent, intensely felt shot reminds the whole world of the goodness of true Neapolitan pizza. The scene was actually filmed at the Antica pizzeria da Michele in Forcella (a historic working-class neighbourhood of Naples). Having served pizza to everyone who passed through Naples — from Bill Clinton to Maradona — the pizzeria has since opened in Rome on Via Flaminia, in Japan in Fukuoka and in Tokyo (in the Ebisu neighbourhood), in London this very month on Baker Street, and shortly in Barcelona on Carrer De Consell De Cent. In Milan it will take over the former restaurant of Joe Bastianich and Belen Rodriguez.
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