Pizza
Executive summary
Pizza traces its deep roots to ancient flatbreads topped and baked across Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures but crystallized into the modern form in Naples, Italy, where inexpensive flatbreads with tomato and cheese became a working‑class staple; that Neapolitan lineage—and its later global reinvention in places like New York and Chicago—frames most serious scholarly accounts [1] [2] [3]. The popular origin stories (the 1889 Margherita tale, Marco Polo/China theories) coexist with verified documentary and culinary evidence but are often simplified or mythologized in popular writing [4] [5] [6].
1. Ancient flatbreads: the distant precursors of pizza
Evidence summarized by food historians places the conceptual precursors of pizza in prehistoric and ancient practices of baking dough on hot stones—flatbreads topped with oils, herbs, and sometimes cheese were eaten by Egyptians, Greeks and Romans—so while these early foods are not “pizza” in the modern sense, they supply the continuous culinary lineage that leads to later Neapolitan forms [1] [7].
2. Naples as the crucible of modern pizza
Scholarly and popular histories converge on Naples and the Campania region as the birthplace of the modern pizza: by the 18th–19th centuries street vendors and simple tavern kitchens in Naples were selling flatbreads topped with tomato, cheese and other inexpensive ingredients to workers, and that social and economic context produced the pizza forms recognizable today [2] [8] [7].
3. The Margherita story, royal endorsement and its limits
The famous 1889 episode in which a Neapolitan pizzaiolo is said to have created a tomato‑mozzarella‑basil pie for Queen Margherita—naming it after her and linking its colors to the Italian flag—is widely retold and present in tourist and culinary literature, but historians note uncertainties in the exact authorship and the degree to which the episode single‑handedly created the pizza’s fame; the story remains a powerful origin myth cited in many accounts [4] [9].
4. Migration, American innovation and regional styles
Italian emigration carried pizza abroad, where it evolved into distinct regional styles: one of the first licensed U.S. pizzerias was Lombardi’s in New York City (licensed 1905), and New York‑style pizza (characterized by low‑moisture mozzarella and floppy slices) and Chicago’s deep‑dish (a thicker, often layered pie) emerged as dominant American variants alongside Detroit, St. Louis and others, each shaped by local ingredients, ovens and immigrant communities [2] [10] [8].
5. Ingredients, provenance and legal protection
Certain Neapolitan ingredients and practices have been institutionalized: authentic Neapolitan pizza typically uses San Marzano tomatoes and either buffalo mozzarella or fior di latte, and European protections have recognized “pizza napoletana” with designations like the PDO for pizza Napoletana components and related products—an attempt to lock culinary heritage into legal and commercial frameworks [7] [6] [3].
6. Myths, contested origins and what we still can’t prove
Competing claims—such as a theory that Marco Polo brought a Chinese scallion pancake that inspired pizza—are persistent in popular retellings but lack documentary proof strong enough to overturn the Neapolitan narrative, and historians caution that while tomatoes did not reach Europe until the 16th century (so “modern” pizza post‑dates that), the exact timeline and single “inventor” remain elusive; multiple sources stress continuity of flatbread traditions rather than a single point of creation [5] [11] [1]. Where reportage or marketing asserts tidy origin stories, the documentary record often supports a more gradual evolution; when sources conflict or advance patriotic or commercial agendas—tourism boards, pizzeria histories and national myths—those motives should be weighed alongside archival evidence [4] [8].