History of Pizza

From the food of the poor and neglected, pizza became the food of everyone. The history of pizza travelling over continents through historical eras, dating back as far as the Syrian period, is a remarkably clear history of a millennial globalization.

Early Greeks baked flat bread on heated stones, topped it with oils and herbs, and called it plankuntos, which loosely translates as ‘edible plate’.

The dish moved to Italy, where the first history of Rome from the third century BC speaks of “flat round dough dressed with live, oil, herbs and honey, baked on stones”.

The plural word ‘pizza’ appeared for the first time in a document of 997, the Codex Diplomaticus Cajetanus, discovered inside the Abbey of Montecassino, Gaeta, south of Rome.

The true “pizza napoletana” as it is understood in Naples is a disc of dough on which tomato is spread. Pizza napoletana made its way around the world as a special culinary product. This use of the term pizza was born after a specific historical event: the discovery in 1492 of the New World by Christopher Columbus. It was precisely the Genoese navigator who brought the tomato plant to Europe.

In 1596, the tomato plant was exported to Naples by Spain where it was used as an ornamental plant. Vincenzo Corrado Oritano an Italian cook, philosopher and literary in his book ‘Cuoco Galante (1773) declares that the tomato was used to top pizza.

Journalist Matilde Serao wrote in II Ventre di Napoli in 1834 about pizza, the common people eat. Serao describes pizza as a food costing only one coin, being both the breakfast and the lunch of most of the poor inhabitants of the city. It is one of the most popular foods of the city.

The first pizzerias, without doubt, were born in Naples and until the middle of the 20th century the product was exclusively a commodity of Naples and its pizzerias.

In 1843, Alexandre Dumas present pizza as the food of the lazzarone, the plebeian who eats pizza in winter and watermelon in summer.

In the early 1900s, migrants brought the dish to New York, and from there it flourished in Italian neighborhood along the East Coast from Philadelphia to Boston.

Italian immigrant Giovanni Lombardi opened the first pizzeria in 1905 in the Little Italy section of New York. By the 1930s, pizzerias had spread across the country.
History of Pizza