Almost every article about pizza tells you the same story. In June 1889 a Neapolitan pizza maker named Raffaele Esposito baked three pizzas for Queen Margherita of Savoy, she picked the one in red, white and green, and the Margherita was born. It's a lovely story. It's also shaky: no newspaper of the time seems to have reported the visit, and the tale only started circulating in the 1930s and 1940s. The real history of pizza is messier, older and more interesting. It involves a Latin contract from the year 997, a vegetable that Europeans were scared of, and a dish that Naples invented for people with no money and no kitchen.
Before Pizza Was Pizza
People have been putting things on flat bread for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks topped theirs with oil, herbs and cheese, and the Romans baked a flatbread on the hearth called panis focacius, from the Latin word for hearth, the ancestor of today's focaccia. Archaeologistsreported a Pompeii fresco in 2023 that seems to show a pizza-like dish among other foods. A popular story even has Persian soldiers under Darius the Great baking flatbreads with cheese and dates on their shields.
The word is older than you'd guess. The earliest known written pizza turns up in May 997 in a Latin document from Gaeta, a port on the coast between Rome and Naples. A tenant agrees to give the local bishop twelve "pizze", a pork shoulder and a kidney every Christmas, then twelve more pizze and a pair of chickens at Easter. Nobody knows what those pizze looked like. Scholars trace the word to a Greek or Latin flatbread called pitta, or to words for pounding, pinching or a mouthful.
So is a flatbread with stuff on it already pizza? Not quite. Focaccia is left to rise after it's flattened, while pizza goes into the oven straight away. And the thing that makes pizza what it is today, tomato on a fast, hot, thin base, had to wait for a plant from the Americas.
Naples, the Poor and the Tomato
Tomatoes reached Europe after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec capital in 1521. In Italy they spent their first decades as garden decoration, and many people suspected they were poisonous. By the late 1700s the poor of Naples, a huge port city with a lot of hungry people, had started putting them on their flatbread. The tomato was cheap, it tasted like something, and a flat disc of dough could be baked in a minute and eaten with your hands on the way to work.
Pizza in Naples was street food before it was restaurant food. It was sold from stands and bakeries, and hawkers carried it around. Around 1830 the first pizzerias with tables appeared, and Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba still claims to be the first of them, though the date is a claim rather than a proven fact. By one historian's count, the city had 54 pizzerias in 1807 and around 120 in the second half of the century. In 1843 Alexandre Dumas wrote about the variety of toppings, and the Neapolitan writers of the mid-1800s already describe garlic and oil, cheese and basil, little fish, and folded pizzas that later became the calzone.
Two classics came out of this world. Marinara has tomato, oregano, garlic and oil, and the name usually points to sailors, though that's tradition rather than a documented fact. Margherita adds mozzarella and basil. Neither started with cream or ham or pineapple. Both are very simple, and that's the point.
The Margherita Story, Told Honestly
Here's what the legend says. In 1889 King Umberto I and Queen Margherita visited Naples, and Raffaele Esposito, whose shop is now Pizzeria Brandi, made three pizzas for the royal court. The queen liked the one with tomato, mozzarella and basil, the colors of the new Italian flag, and a letter from the royal household supposedly proves it. The letter hangs in the pizzeria to this day.
Here's what the documents say about the Margherita: pizza with tomato, mozzarella and basil existed before 1889. A writer named Emanuele Roccorecorded those toppings in the mid-1800s, decades earlier. Researchers have questioned the authenticity of the queen's letter, no paper reported the visit, and the "Margherita" name only seems to have been pushed hard in the 1930s and 1940s. The honest version is that Esposito may well have baked for the queen, and the name may have stuck because it flattered the royal family and a young nation. What he almost certainly didn't do is invent the combination.
It's also worth remembering how recent the modern savory pizza is. Pellegrino Artusi's famous Italian cookbook gave three pizza recipes, and all three were sweet. A pizza with mozzarella, tomato, anchovy and mushrooms only got into the book on a loose sheet added in the 1911 edition.
What Real Neapolitan Pizza Means Today
Today Neapolitan pizza is one of the few foods with a legal definition. The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN), founded in Naples in 1984, publishes the rules. The dough is just flour, yeast, salt and water. It's kneaded in a slow mixer, shaped by hand with no rolling pin or machine, and baked for 60 to 90 seconds in a wood-fired oven. The European specification puts the oven floor at about 485 degrees Celsius, which is around 900 Fahrenheit. The classic toppings are peeled tomatoes (San Marzano from the slopes of Vesuvius is the famous choice) and mozzarella di bufala campana or fior di latte, with a preference for ingredients from Campania.
The pizza napoletana has been a European "traditional speciality guaranteed" since 2010, a label that locks in a traditional recipe and method. In 2017 UNESCO added the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo to its list of intangible cultural heritage. Note what that protects: a craft, passed from master to apprentice among an estimated 3,000 pizza makers, not a recipe. Pizza fritta, the fried street version, belongs to the same tradition. So does the pizza "a portafoglio", folded twice like a wallet and eaten from a piece of paper while you walk.
Two things surprise first-time visitors. A Neapolitan pizza is soft and wet in the middle, with a puffy, charred rim, and it's served whole to be eaten with knife and fork in a restaurant. If a place hands you a crisp, firm slice, you're eating a different Italian pizza, and there are plenty.
Pizza Across Italy
Italians don't have one pizza, they have regional habits, and most of them are tied to the local flatbread. Roman pizza comes in two main forms. The sit-down pizza tonda is thin and crisp, with oil in the dough for that crackle Romans call scrocchiarella. The pizza al taglio is baked in big rectangular trays and sold by weight, so you point at a tray and say how much you want. Next to it you'll often see pizza bianca, a plain Roman flatbread that bakers fill with ham or cheese.
The fashionable newcomer is pinsa. The name was registered as a trademark in 2001 by an entrepreneur near Rome, and he hassince admitted that the "ancient Roman" backstory was invented to help sell it. It's a decent oval flatbread. It's not a lost recipe from the Forum.
Beyond Naples and Rome, the map breaks into local flatbreads that Italians happily call pizza or something close to it:
- Sicily. The old favorite was a thick pizza, and sfincione from Palermo is its best-known descendant: rectangular, bready, with onion, anchovy and strong cheese, often with less cheese than you'd expect.
- Turin. The small, thick, pan-baked pizza al padellino.
- Liguria. Genoa's focaccia is eaten at breakfast, sometimes dunked in a cappuccino, while the Sanremo-style sardenaira is a cheese-free pizza with anchovies, olives and garlic.
- Puglia. The local focaccia puts potato in the dough and tomatoes and olives on top.
Plenty of this is closer to bread than to Naples pizza, but it's all one family. The calzone is the family's folded cousin.
Pizza Leaves Italy
Pizza travelled with Italian emigrants, and what it turned into depends on where they landed. In the United States it started in Italian neighborhoods in the late 1800s. The pizzeria that's often cited as the first, Lombardi's in New York, dates itself to 1905, though later research found older ones. For decades pizza was mostly eaten by Italian Americans. After World War II, soldiers back from Italy created a mass market, and then came the pans, the chains and the regional styles from New York, Chicago, Detroit and New Haven. That's a whole story of its own, and we tell it in our guide to American pizza styles.
Brazil is another pizza country. The first known pizzeria in São Paulo opened in 1910, in the Italian working-class district of Brás. Today the Brazilian pizza has no standard topping list: ham with onions, egg and olives is called Portuguese, chicken comes with a creamy cheese, and sweet pizzas with chocolate or guava paste are normal. It's usually baked cooler and longer than in Naples, and often eaten with a knife and fork. Argentina went another way. In Buenos Aires the thick, cheesy pizza de molde is the classic, and fugazza (a focaccia-like crust under a pile of onions) takes its name from the Genoese word for focaccia. In Britain, PizzaExpress opened in London in 1965, started by a man who'd tasted Neapolitan pizza on a trip to Italy.
Where to Eat Pizza in Italy
If you want to taste all of this on location, plan around the cities. The proper Neapolitan pizza and the street-food version are both in our 5 days in Naples. Rome has the thin tonda and the al taglio counters, in 5 days in Rome. For sfincione and Sicilian street food, see 5 days in Palermo. Puglia's focaccia is in 5 days in Bari, the pan-baked padellino is in 5 days in Turin, and Ligurian focaccia is in 5 days in Genoa. Our Italy page has the rest of the map, and if you want to see how well you know it first, try Pinpoint.
So who invented pizza? Nobody, in the sense of one person on one day. Flatbreads came first, a tomato crossed the ocean, and the hungry poor of one crowded port put the two together and sold the result by the slice. The Margherita story is better as a story than as history. But what Naples did next is real: over roughly two centuries it turned a poor person's flatbread into a dish with rules, a craft and a UNESCO listing. Every pizza you'll eat, from a Roman al taglio counter to a Brazilian chicken pie, is still a conversation with that.
