A flatbread from Naples
People have eaten flatbread with things on top for thousands of years, but pizza as we know it grew up in Naples, in southern Italy, in the 1700s and 1800s. It was cheap street food for working people, sold from stalls and eaten folded in the hand. It needed the TOMATO, a plant from the Americas that many Europeans had at first thought poisonous.
The most famous story says that in 1889 a Naples pizza maker called Raffaele Esposito made a pizza for Queen Margherita of Italy, topped with tomato, MOZZARELLA and BASIL to match the red, white and green of the Italian flag, and named it the MARGHERITA. Historians doubt parts of the tale, and similar pizzas existed before 1889, but the name stuck. In 2017 the United Nations cultural organisation added the art of the Neapolitan pizza maker to its list of the world's cultural heritage.
Ninety seconds in a very hot oven
A traditional Neapolitan pizza bakes in a wood-fired OVEN at around 450°C, more than twice as hot as a home oven, and is done in about ninety seconds. The heat puffs up the edge of the CRUST into a soft, bubbly rim with dark spots called leopard spots. The DOUGH is just flour, water, salt and yeast, stretched by hand; rules drawn up in Naples say it should never be rolled with a pin.
Proper mozzarella for pizza in Naples is often made from the milk of water buffalo, which are farmed in the countryside around the city. A CALZONE is a pizza folded in half into a pocket before baking, and its name means trouser leg.
Pepperoni is not Italian
Order peperoni in Italy and you may get a pizza covered in peppers, because that is what the Italian word means. PEPPERONI, the spicy sausage, was created by Italian-American butchers in the United States in the early 1900s and is now America's favourite topping. In Italy the nearest thing is spicy SALAMI.
The most argued-about TOPPING, PINEAPPLE with HAM, was invented not in Hawaii but in Canada. In 1962 a Greek-born restaurant owner called Sam Panopoulos, in Chatham, Ontario, tried tinned pineapple on a pizza and called it the Hawaiian after the brand of the tins. In 2017 the president of Iceland joked to a school class that he would ban pineapple on pizza if he could, and the joke made news around the world.
The rest of the grid
A classic Neapolitan marinara has no cheese at all: just SAUCE, GARLIC, oregano and olive oil. Other toppings in the grid, from the MUSHROOM, ONION, PEPPER and OLIVES to the salty ANCHOVY, turn up across Italy. One of the most famous pizza orders in history was paid for in a digital currency, and our cryptocurrency page tells that story. Pizza crossed the Atlantic with Italian immigrants, and Lombardi's in New York, licensed in 1905, is often called America's first pizzeria. New Yorkers fold a thin SLICE lengthways to eat it, while Chicago's deep-dish pizza, first served in 1943, is baked in a tall pan with the CHEESE underneath the sauce.