History of Pizza: From Naples to UNESCO Heritage

A word older than the dish

The word “pizza” existed long before pizza as it’s eaten today. It already appears in a lease contract from 997, drawn up in Gaeta — the oldest document in which scholars have found it so far. Two different theories circulate about the word’s origin, and neither has been fully settled: one traces it to an Old High German word, bizzo or pizzo, meaning a bite or a piece of bread; the other links it to the Arabic pita. Neither has convinced every scholar, and Treccani’s own dictionary entry describes the origin as “possibly” Germanic, without closing the question.

Whatever the word indicated in 997 was, in any case, something quite different from Neapolitan pizza: probably a flatbread or focaccia, simply topped. Flat, topped breads did exist in various cuisines of the ancient world, though no solid source documents a direct link between those dishes and modern pizza — a leap worth not taking for granted.

Naples, where the dish was born

The dish recognizable today, leavened dough stretched into a round, flat shape, baked in an oven and topped, was born in Naples in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was not a refined dish: it was street food, cheap, meant to fill people up quickly. The journalist Matilde Serao, describing the Naples of her time, called it food “that turns yellow in the sun, eaten by flies” — an image about as far as possible from the gourmet dish pizza would become much later.

On the date of the first pizzeria in history, though, sources disagree, and it’s more honest to say so than to invent a synthesis that doesn’t exist. A document dated 21 July 1792 records that the Kingdom’s Ministry of General Police granted a license to a certain Giuseppe Sorrentino to bake pizzas in the Loreto district of Naples: it’s the earliest known document of this kind. Another source, however, points to an earlier origin for the Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, founded in 1738 and turned into a proper restaurant with tables in 1830. The two sources don’t cite each other, and neither is enough on its own to settle the question.

Fact	Source	Year
License to bake pizzas in Naples (Giuseppe Sorrentino)	Treccani, Atlante magazine	1792
Founding of the Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba	Smithsonian Magazine	1738
Port’Alba becomes a restaurant with tables	Smithsonian Magazine	1830

Practical example: in 1835 the French writer Alexandre Dumas père stayed in Naples and described pizza in his book Le Corricolo, a sign that the dish was already well known enough to strike a foreign visitor. A few years earlier, in 1831, the American inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, had instead dismissed it as “a species of the most nauseating cake”: pizza, it turns out, didn’t win over every tourist of the time.

Anyone curious how a poor person’s dish turns, over time, into a national symbol can find a parallel in another Italian food story, that of carbonara, also born from simple ingredients and later wrapped in legends about its own origin.

The case of Queen Margherita

The most retold story about pizza concerns a royal visit in 1889. According to the most popular version, the cook Raffaele Esposito, together with his wife, prepared three different pizzas for King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy, who were visiting Naples; the queen supposedly chose the one with the three colors of the Italian flag, red tomato, green basil and white mozzarella, which has carried her name ever since. It’s the story that also appears in Treccani’s Encyclopedia for young readers, told as a straightforward fact.

Another reconstruction, though, calls for more caution: the letter that would document the episode, dated 11 June 1889 and attributed to Camillo Galli, head of the Royal Household staff, is considered almost certainly a forgery, the only evidence for an event no other document confirms. Not only that: pizzas very similar to the “Margherita,” with basil, mozzarella and tomato, already appeared in written sources well before 1889. Emanuele Rocco described one in 1853, and the writer Francesco De Bouchard did the same in his 1866 book on the customs of Naples. A similar story to the queen’s, moreover, had already circulated in 1880 in a newspaper of the time, referring to a different episode.

It isn’t possible, with the sources available, to establish with certainty what really happened in June 1889. The fairest thing to say is that the Queen Margherita story remains a popular but historically disputed legend, not an established fact: the tricolor pizza almost certainly already existed before, and the real episode may have given a name to a dish that already existed, rather than creating it.

For context: southern Italy had joined the Kingdom in 1861, Rome was annexed in 1870, and Umberto I was crowned king in 1878. Esposito’s pizzeria later passed to the Brandi family in 1932, and in 1989 a commemorative plaque was placed in Naples that marks the episode, legendary or not.

A recognition that arrived late, but official

Far more solid, because confirmed by two independent sources, is what happened in 2017. That year UNESCO added the “Art of Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo” to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, during a session held in Jeju, South Korea. The bid had started in 2009, backed by Coldiretti, the Associazione Pizzaiuoli Napoletani and the Fondazione UniVerde, and had gathered around two million signatures of support.

According to the official UNESCO record, what is recognized isn’t a recipe but a know-how: the practice covers four distinct phases, from preparing the dough to baking it in a wood-fired oven with the pizzaiolo’s characteristic rotating movement. About 3,000 pizzaiuoli live and work in Naples, according to UNESCO, divided into three recognized categories: the Master Pizzaiuolo, the pizzaiuolo, and the baker, plus the Neapolitan families who pass the craft down at home.

Practical example: the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN) certifies establishments that follow a precise set of rules, baking for about 90 seconds at around 480°C (900°F), nearly double American gas ovens, a maximum diameter of about 35 centimeters, and dough fermented from 12 hours up to several days. Of the roughly 8,200 pizzerias counted in Naples, according to Smithsonian Magazine, only about 125, under 2% of the total, have earned this certification: a sign of just how much the “official” recipe remains a minority within the real variety of Neapolitan pizzerias.

Tomato, an ingredient that arrived later

A detail that surprises anyone who thinks of pizza as an “unchanging” dish: tomato, now its most recognizable ingredient, reached Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century, and for roughly two centuries Europeans considered it a poisonous plant, unfit to eat. Among the historic variants of Neapolitan pizza, the “Marinara” was born in the eighteenth century.

Anyone curious about why certain foods stay outside common use for a long time, for reasons that aren’t always scientific, can find a parallel in the history of fermentation, a process used for centuries in many of the world’s kitchens well before it was understood at a chemical level. The science of leavening, essential to pizza dough, also has its own story of practical intuition arriving long before the scientific explanation.

From Naples to the world

For most of its history, pizza remained an almost exclusively Neapolitan dish. Its spread on an industrial scale, according to Treccani’s Encyclopedia for young readers, began only in the 1960s, driven above all by the American chain Pizza Hut, one of the reasons the dish eventually became, in more recent times, one of the most widespread foods in the world.

From there, pizza took different paths depending on the country. In the United States, regional variants emerged quite far from the Neapolitan original: the “pies” of New Jersey, New Haven’s “apizza” in Connecticut, or the version made with Provel cheese typical of St. Louis. Several Neapolitan pizza makers have also opened branches abroad: the most cited case is Gino Sorbillo, with locations in Milan, New York, Rome, Tokyo, Miami and Genoa.

In Naples, meanwhile, some social customs tied to pizza as a shared food have stayed alive. “Pizza sospesa” (“suspended pizza”) means paying for an extra pizza, left available for someone who can’t afford one. “Pizza a otto” traditionally allows a pizza to be paid for even eight days after eating it. And the “portafoglio” (“wallet”) fold is the gesture of folding a pizza in half to eat it while walking down the street, without cutlery.

Summary table of key milestones

Year	Event
997	First attestation of the word “pizza,” in a document from Gaeta
First half of the nineteenth century	Pizza as known today is born in Naples
1738 or 1792 (sources disagree)	First pizzeria in history
1835	Alexandre Dumas describes pizza in Le Corricolo
1889	Alleged Queen Margherita episode (disputed legend)
1960s	Industrial spread of pizza, helped by Pizza Hut
2009-2017	Bid and UNESCO recognition of the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo