The History of Neapolitan Pizza

We have eaten a lot of pizza in Naples, and it does spoil you for anywhere else. Neapolitan pizza is a soft, blistered, two-topping thing that looks almost too simple, yet it carries about 250 years of history and a rulebook to match. Known in Italy as pizza napoletana, it started as cheap street food for the poor and ended up on the UNESCO heritage list. This is the story of where it came from, what makes it the real thing, and where we go to eat the best of it in Naples.

Where did pizza originate?

Flatbreads with oil and herbs go back to the ancient Mediterranean, so the wider history of pizza is long, but pizza as we know it took shape in Naples in the 1700s. The city was crowded with the working poor, the lazzaroni, who needed food that was cheap, quick and eaten with the hands. Street sellers cooked flatbreads topped with what was to hand, lard, garlic, then tomatoes once the New World fruit caught on locally. The rich looked down on it, and the American inventor Samuel Morse called a Naples pizza nauseating in the 1830s. The tomato had only reached Europe from the Americas in the 1500s and was feared as poisonous at first, so it took until the 1700s for Neapolitans to pile it onto flatbread. By 1738 the city had Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, which started as a stall feeding street sellers and is often called the first real pizzeria. It stayed a poor person’s food in Italy for decades, barely known outside the city.

The Pizza Margherita story

The famous turning point came in 1889. As the traditional story goes, King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy visited Naples, and the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito was asked to make pizzas for the queen. She is said to have preferred the one with tomato, mozzarella and basil, the red, white and green of the new Italian flag, and Esposito named it Pizza Margherita in her honour. It is a neat story, and the pizza margherita history you read on menus everywhere, though historians point out the letter thanking Esposito has been questioned and versions of the pizza existed before. True or embroidered, the tale helped turn a slum food into a national symbol.

What is Neapolitan pizza?

Ask what is Neapolitan pizza and the answer is surprisingly strict. Since 1984 the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana has set the rules for the real thing. The dough is just flour, water, salt and yeast, hand-stretched, never rolled, with a puffy raised rim called the cornicione. The tomatoes should be San Marzano grown in the volcanic soil near Vesuvius, the cheese mozzarella di bufala campana or fior di latte, and the whole pizza baked in a wood-fired oven at around 430 to 485 degrees for 60 to 90 seconds. That fierce, fast bake gives the soft, slightly wet, leopard-spotted base. Traditionally there are only two, the marinara with tomato, garlic and oregano and no cheese, and the margherita. In the last decade a puffier style with a huge airy rim, nicknamed the canotto or dinghy, has taken over many menus, to the annoyance of purists who prefer the flatter old cartwheel shape.

How is Neapolitan pizza made?

The method is as fixed as the ingredients. The dough uses soft 00 flour and rises slowly, often 8 to 24 hours, which is what makes it light and easy on the stomach. A pizzaiolo stretches each ball by hand, dresses it fast, and slides it into the wood oven on a peel, turning it once as it puffs and chars. A minute later it comes out soft in the middle, so a real Neapolitan pizza droops when you lift a slice and is often eaten with a knife and fork or folded like a wallet, a portafoglio. The recipe is protected in the EU as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed, on top of the UNESCO listing for the craft.

Pizza fritta, the fried cousin

Not all Naples pizza comes from the oven. Pizza fritta, deep-fried dough stuffed with ricotta, provola, pork cracklings and tomato, is the older street version, born in the hard years after the war when ovens and toppings were scarce. It is sold folded in paper from tiny hatches in the old town and is worth trying once. Montanara, a smaller fried disc topped with sauce and cheese, is the starter many pizzerias bring out first.

How Neapolitan pizza spread from Naples

Naples was a busy port, and the pizza travelled out with the ships. Sailors and traders carried it up the coast, but the bigger jump came with emigration. As Neapolitans left for the United States in the late 1800s, they took the recipe with them, and Gennaro Lombardi opened what is often called America’s first pizzeria in Manhattan in 1905. In a twist, the artisan Neapolitan style has since travelled back out as the premium version, and AVPN-certified pizzerias now run in cities like London, New York and Tokyo. From there pizza mutated into the New York slice, Chicago deep-dish and a thousand chains, most of which a Neapolitan would barely recognise. The neapolitan pizza history that matters, though, stayed put in Naples, cooked much the same way for generations.

UNESCO and the art of the pizzaiuolo

In 2017 the craft got official recognition when UNESCO added the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The listing is not about the pizza on the plate but the skill, the hand-stretching, the oven work and the patter of the pizza-makers, passed down in the workshops of Naples. It put the craft alongside things like Spanish flamenco and cemented what Neapolitans always knew, that this is culture, not just dinner.

Where to eat the best pizza in Naples

You cannot write about the history without saying where to taste it. For the best pizza in Naples we head for the old-town pizzerias, most within a short walk of Via dei Tribunali. A plain margherita runs about 5 to 8 euros, a marinara less, and the queues at the famous ones are part of the deal. Sorbillo pulls the longest line, so when the wait tops an hour we often walk to a quieter pizzeria a few doors along. These are our regular stops, and for where the rest of Italy’s food obsessions lead, how Romans eat is a story of its own. Go early or late to dodge the worst waits.

If a trip to Naples is on the cards, build a day around two or three of these pizzerias and eat pizza for both lunch and dinner. We put Italy among the world’s best cuisines anywhere, and pizza is a big reason why. Buon appetito.

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