Where was pizza invented?

The short answer

Bakers in Naples, in southern Italy, invented pizza in the 1700s. They topped rounds of yeast dough with tomato, cheese, oil or herbs and sold them cheap from open-air stalls and bakery ovens. By 1830 Naples had pizzerias with tables and chairs.

Cooks had put toppings on flatbread long before that, and the word "pizza" turns up in Italy as early as 997. The pizza you would recognise needed one more ingredient: the tomato, which reached Europe from the Americas in the 1500s. Neapolitan bakers put the two together.

Flatbreads before Naples

Records of cooks adding oil, herbs or cheese to flatbread go back to the ancient Mediterranean. Greeks and Romans ate breads like that, but nobody called them pizza, and none of them had tomato.

The word first appears in a Latin document from Gaeta, a port town between Rome and Naples, dated 997. In it, a tenant agrees to give the bishop of Gaeta twelve pizzas every Christmas and twelve more every Easter. Nobody knows what those pizzas looked like. Linguists still argue over where the word came from, and one theory links it to pitta, a flatbread word in Byzantine Greek and late Latin.

Naples and the tomato

Tomatoes crossed the Atlantic in the 1500s, and many Europeans distrusted them for years because the plant belongs to the nightshade family. In Naples, bakers started topping their flatbread with tomato some time in the 1700s or early 1800s. They sold it cheap from open-air stalls and bakeries, and people ate it in the street.

Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba, by one of the old city gates, began as a stall in 1738 and added tables in 1830. It claims the title of the world's oldest pizzeria and still makes pizza today. By 1853 the toppings had settled into something familiar: an essay on Neapolitan life by the writer Emanuele Rocco, published that year, describes pizza topped with basil, mozzarella and tomato.

The Margherita and the queen

The most famous pizza story starts in June 1889. King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Italy were staying in Naples, and a pizza maker called Raffaele Esposito baked three pizzas for them at Capodimonte, their palace in the city. The queen liked the one in the colours of the Italian flag best: red tomato, white mozzarella and green basil. Esposito named it after her. A letter dated June 11, 1889, signed in the name of the head of the royal table service, thanks him for the pizzas, and it still hangs in his old shop, now Pizzeria Brandi.

Historians have found holes in the story. Rocco's essay shows Neapolitans eating pizza with tomato, mozzarella and basil 36 years before the royal visit. The official gazette that carried royal news never mentions the visit or the letter, and the signature on the letter does not match other samples of that official's handwriting. The letter also addresses "Raffaele Esposito Brandi", adding the surname of his wife's family, whose nephews took over the pizzeria in 1932. One theory holds that the family wrote the letter themselves to bring in customers.

The name may have a simpler source. Margherita is also the Italian word for daisy, and some accounts say the slices of mozzarella sat on the pizza like petals. Every version agrees on the city, though, and in Meridish the Margherita's pin goes in Naples. You can see its hometown on the Pizza Margherita page.

How Naples guards its pizza

Neapolitan pizza makers have spent decades writing their craft down. In 1984 a group of them founded the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana in Naples, which sets out what a true Neapolitan pizza is and certifies pizzerias that follow its rules. In 2009, at Italy's request, the European Union registered Neapolitan pizza as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed, a label that protects a traditional recipe and method.

In December 2017 UNESCO added the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo, the pizza maker, to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. UNESCO's record describes four stages, from making the dough to baking the pizza in a wood-fired oven while turning it, and counts about 3,000 pizzaiuoli working in Naples. Apprentices still learn the craft by watching masters at work in the shop.

How pizza reached America

Italian immigrants brought pizza to the United States at the end of the 1800s, and New York had pizzerias by the turn of the century. For decades the accepted story said Gennaro Lombardi opened America's first licensed pizzeria on Spring Street in Manhattan in 1905. In 2019 the pizza historian Peter Regas published research that questions it. He found no record of the 1905 license, and he found that Lombardi arrived in New York in 1904, at 17, listed as a laborer. Regas credits another immigrant, Filippo Milone, with opening the Spring Street shop around 1898. A baker named Giovanni Santillo was making pizza there by 1901, and Lombardi bought the business in 1908.

Italian-American cooks went on to build their own styles on the Neapolitan original, and several American cities now claim one.

Pizza styles and their home cities

Each style below has a city it calls home and a start year most accounts agree on. Several of those years come from a single restaurant's account, and historians argue over some of them.

Pizzeria Uno's founders, Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo, get the credit for deep-dish, but no record names the cook who first made it. Frank Pepe sold pizza from a wagon before he opened on Wooster Street, and his family still runs the pizzeria.

Questions

Sources

1. UNESCO, Art of Neapolitan 'Pizzaiuolo', inscribed in 2017.
2. National Geographic, Pizza Margherita may be fit for a queen, but was it really named after one?
3. Smithsonian Magazine, on Peter Regas's research into Lombardi's and Filippo Milone.
4. Wikipedia, Pizza: the Gaeta document, the tomato, Neapolitan pizza's EU registration and the regional styles.
5. Wikipedia, Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba.
6. Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, About us.
7. Mental Floss, Who invented deep-dish pizza?