The Origins of Pizza

Pizza is one of the most popular foods in the world. But modern pizza is not very old.

People have baked flat bread for thousands of years, and often put oil, herbs or cheese on top. The pizza we know today began in Naples, in southern Italy, in the 1700s and 1800s. It was food for poor people. It was cheap, you could eat it with your hands, and you could buy it on the street.

Tomatoes came to Europe from the Americas. At first many Europeans did not trust them. But the poor people of Naples started putting tomatoes on their flat bread, and it worked well.

There is a famous story from 1889. A pizza maker made a pizza for the Queen of Italy with tomato (red), mozzarella (white) and basil (green) — the colours of the Italian flag. He called it "Margherita", the Queen's name.

Later, Italian people moved to the United States and took pizza with them. From there, it spread around the world, and every country changed it a little.

It is hard to think of a food more globally familiar than pizza, and easy to assume it has always been with us. In its modern form it is roughly two hundred years old.

Flatbreads topped with oil, herbs and whatever else was to hand are ancient and appear all around the Mediterranean. What we now call pizza emerged specifically in Naples in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and it emerged as street food for the urban poor. It was cheap, portable, eaten standing up, and sold from open-fronted shops and stalls. Respectable opinion looked down on it.

The tomato was the crucial addition. Brought from the Americas, it was regarded with suspicion in much of Europe for two centuries, but the poor of Naples had less to lose and began using it. The pairing of tomato, cheese and dough on a fast, hot oven became the template.

The turning point in pizza's reputation is usually dated to 1889, when a Neapolitan pizzaiolo is said to have prepared a version for Queen Margherita using tomato, mozzarella and basil — red, white and green. The story may be embellished, but the name stuck, and it marked pizza's move from slum food towards national symbol. Mass emigration then carried it to the United States, where it was reinvented at scale and re-exported to the world.

Pizza is now so thoroughly globalised that its specificity is easy to forget. It is not an ancient or a pan-Italian dish; it is a Neapolitan one, and a relatively recent product of a particular urban poverty.

Topped flatbreads are of course old and widespread, but the object we recognise as pizza — a soft, rapidly baked disc of wheat dough dressed with tomato and cheese — took shape in the crowded, impoverished quarters of Naples across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was, unambiguously, food of the poor: inexpensive, requiring no cutlery, sold by the slice from street-level premises to people who often had no kitchen of their own. Contemporary bourgeois commentators treated it as an object of mild disgust, which is a fairly reliable sign that a food is doing important work for people without other options.

The tomato's incorporation is the pivot of the story. A New World import, it was met across much of Europe with a distrust that lasted generations; the Neapolitan poor, with a narrower margin for caution, adopted it, and in doing so assembled the combination that would conquer the world.

Pizza's rehabilitation and then its ascent followed two external shocks. The first was symbolic: the much-repeated, probably tidied-up account of the 1889 Margherita, which attached a royal name and the national colours to a food of the slums. The second was demographic: the vast southern-Italian emigration to the Americas, which transplanted pizza to a context where it was industrialised, standardised and franchised, then sold back to the rest of the planet — including, eventually, to an Italy that now polices the authenticity of the thing it once disdained.