The History of Pizza — The Food Italy Was Ashamed Of

3 billion. That is how many pizzas Americans alone eat every single year. 350 slices disappear every second of every day. The global pizza industry is worth over 160 billion dollars and climbing. You can order pizza in Tokyo, in Sao Paulo, in Lagos, in a tiny village in rural Norway. It is arguably the single most popular food ever created by human beings. But for most of its history, the country that actually invented pizza wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Italy's own food writers called pizza disgusting. The country's first cookbooks refused to even mention it. Cookbooks dedicated specifically to Neapolitan cooking, the cuisine of the very city that gave the world pizza, pretended it did not exist. One of the most famous American inventors of the 1800s visited Naples, tried pizza and compared it to a piece of bread pulled reeking out of a sewer. The upper classes of Naples treated pizza like a shameful secret, something that only the most desperate and unwashed members of society would ever put in their mouths. However, the true story of how the most despised street food on earth clawed its way to becoming the most beloved meal in the world is a story of poverty, fear, a fruit everyone thought was poisonous, a queen who was bored of French food, and a world war that changed everything. To understand how pizza began, you need to picture Naples in the 1700s. Not the romantic seaside city you see on postcards today, but a place bursting at the seams with people and problems. Under the Bourbon kings, Naples had become one of the largest cities in Europe. Overseas trade was pulling peasants in from the countryside by the tens of thousands, and the population ballooned from around 200,000 in 1700 to nearly 400,000 by 1748. That kind of growth would strain any city. But Naples could not keep up. Jobs were scarce, wages were low, and a massive underclass was growing faster than the city could feed it. The poorest of these people were called the Lazzaroni. The name came from Lazarus, the biblical figure raised from the dead, because these workers looked so ragged and beaten down that they resembled someone who had just crawled out of a grave. There were roughly 50,000 of them, which meant about 1 in every 8 people in Naples was living in serious poverty. The Lazzaroni worked as porters, messengers, and day laborers. They were constantly rushing from one job to the next, scraping together whatever coins they could. And they had one very specific need when it came to food. It had to be cheap, it had to be fast, and it had to be something they could eat with their hands while walking. Pizza met every single one of those requirements. But these were not the pizzas you are picturing right now. Forget the delivery box, the pepperoni, the mozzarella bubbling in a brick oven. The earliest pizzas were small flatbreads sold by street vendors who walked through the narrow streets of Naples, carrying enormous wooden boxes under their arms. Some vendors balanced hot tin stoves on their heads. They would slice a piece to match whatever the customer could afford. If you had a few coins, you got a bigger portion. If you had almost nothing, you got a sliver. There was no set size, no menu, no prices posted on a wall. You told the vendor what you had, and he cut accordingly. The cheapest pizzas had nothing on them except lard, garlic, and salt. If you could scrape together a little more money, you might get some casiocavallo cheese made from horse milk, or some anchovies, or a bit of fresh basil. Pizza was eaten whole, never sliced into triangles. You got your piece, it came wrapped in rough brown paper, and you ate it on the spot while walking to your next job. And here is a detail that tells you how desperate things were. Naples had a pizza credit system called Pizza a Otto, meaning you could take your pizza now and pay for it 8 days later. If you died before those 8 days were up, people called that unpaid pizza your last supper. That is not a joke. That is how close to the edge these people were living. But the ingredient that would eventually make pizza famous had not shown up yet, and when it did, nobody wanted to touch it. Tomatoes arrived in Europe from South America sometime in the early 1500s, carried back by Spanish conquistadors returning from expeditions in Mexico and Peru. They were small, yellowish, and looked nothing like the big red fruit we know today, and Europeans were terrified of them. The reason was straightforward, but powerful. Tomatoes belonged to the nightshade family, the exact same plant family as deadly nightshade, one of the most poisonous plants on the continent, a plant that could kill you if you ate its berries. An Italian herbalist named Pietro Andrea Mattioli made things considerably worse in 1544 when he formally classified the tomato as a type of nightshade and mandrake in the first written European record of the fruit. From that point on, most of educated Europe treated the tomato like it was a ticking time bomb sitting on the dinner table. The fruit even earned the nickname poison apple, and for about 200 years, the majority of Europeans would not go near it. And here is where it gets strange, because the rich actually did get sick after eating tomatoes, which only confirmed everyone's worst fears. But it was not the tomato's fault at all. Wealthy Europeans ate off pewter plates, and pewter in those days contained high levels of lead. The acid in the tomato pulled the lead right out of the plate and into the food. People were getting lead poisoning and blaming the fruit. It was one of the great misunderstandings in the history of food. The poor, on the other hand, ate off wooden bowls and simple clay dishes. No lead content, no poisoning, no problem. So while the upper classes of Italy and England and France treated tomatoes like a deadly curse, the working poor of southern Italy just kept eating them because they had no choice. The poor could not afford to be picky about what they put on their plates. Tomatoes were cheap, grew easily in the warm southern climate, and added real flavor to food that was otherwise pretty bland. The first published recipe for tomato sauce appeared in 1694, written by a Neapolitan chef named Antonio Latini. He described how tomatoes combined with onions and herbs created a sauce that worked on all kinds of dishes. But it took another century for the pairing that would change everything. Sometime in the late 1700s, someone in the slums of Naples put tomato on top of a flatbread, and modern pizza was born. It was not a moment anyone recorded or celebrated. No one wrote it down. It was just poor people feeding themselves with whatever they had, but that combination of bread, tomato, and eventually cheese from the local dairy farms turned out to be something special. The acid of the tomato played off the fat of the cheese in a way that tasted far better than either ingredient alone. But even after pizza found its signature ingredient, the rest of Italy still wanted nothing to do with it. This is the part of the story that most people never hear. Pizza was not just overlooked, it was actively despised. The food carried the stink of poverty, and the people who ate it were considered barely a step above beggars. Foreign visitors to Naples were especially harsh. In 1831, an American named Samuel Morse visited Naples. This is the same Samuel Morse who would later invent the telegraph. He tried pizza and described it as, and these are close to his exact words, a species of the most nauseating cake, covered with slices of tomato, sprinkled with little fish and black pepper, the whole thing looking like a piece of bread that had been taken reeking out of the sewer. That is one of the most famous inventors in history comparing pizza to sewer bread. He was not alone in his disgust. Alexandre Dumas, the French novelist who wrote The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, traveled through Naples in 1835 and spent time studying the Lazzaroni and their habits. He observed that the poor of Naples survived exclusively on pizza in the winter and watermelon in the summer, as if this were a curiosity worth documenting rather than a food worth trying. Dumas even documented the pizza economy in detail, noting that marinara pizza prices rose and fell that fresh pizza cost more than day-old pizza, and that stale pizza was the cheapest option for those who had almost nothing. He treated it like an anthropological curiosity, not a food worth recommending. The real insult came when Italy's first proper cookbooks started appearing in the late 1800s. These were books meant to capture the best of Italian cooking for a national audience, and they ignored pizza completely. Even the cookbooks that focused specifically on Neapolitan cuisine, the cooking traditions of the very city that had invented pizza, refused to include a single recipe for it. The food of the Lazzaroni was too low, too common, too embarrassing to put in print. Italy was building a national identity after unification in 1861, and pizza did not fit the image the country wanted to project. But then something happened that nobody saw coming, and it started with a queen who was bored of her dinner. In 1889, King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy paid a visit to Naples. Italy had only been unified as a single country since 1861, and it was still fragile. Regional identities ran deep, and royal visits to major cities were part of an ongoing effort to make feel like they belonged to one nation. The king and queen had been eating elaborate French cuisine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, because that was what European aristocrats did in those days. French food was considered the height of sophistication. Italian peasant food, on the other hand, was treated as beneath the dignity of a royal table. But Queen Margherita was apparently getting thoroughly tired of the complicated French dishes. She wanted to try something local, something that actually tasted like Naples. A pizza maker named Raffaele Esposito was summoned to prepare some food for the queen. He made three different pizzas. One had lard, caciocavallo cheese, and basil. Another had sezzanelli, which are tiny white bait fish, and the third had tomatoes, mozzarella, and fresh basil. The queen reportedly loved the third one. The combination of red tomato, white mozzarella, and green basil happened to mirror the colors of the Italian flag, which made it the perfect symbol for a country still figuring out what it meant to be unified. Esposito named it Pizza Margherita in her honor, and a legend was born. Now, historians have questions about some of these details. There is a thank you letter in the archives of Esposito's pizzeria, but whether the queen actually picked that specific pizza because of the flag colors, or whether the whole story got polished over time, nobody can say for sure. What is certain is that having the queen's name attached to pizza changed how people thought about it. Overnight, pizza went from being something that only the poorest of the poor would eat to something that a queen had endorsed. It was not a complete transformation. The upper classes did not suddenly start lining up at pizza stalls, but the seal of royal approval cracked open a door that had been shut for over a century. Now, it is worth mentioning that even before the queen's visit, pizza had been slowly crawling toward respectability in Naples itself. A place called Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba had been operating as a street stall since 1738, using ovens lined with volcanic stone from Mount Vesuvius. In 1830, it became a proper sit-down restaurant, which many food historians consider the world's first real pizzeria. It is still open today, nearly three centuries later. But the fact that a pizza restaurant existed did not mean the rest of Italy cared. Pizza stayed stubbornly local. Even with the queen's endorsement, the rest of the country was not rushing to adopt it. Northern Italians looked at pizza the same way a Parisian might look at a gas station hot dog. It was southern food, poor food, not worth the attention of anyone with taste. The real force that finally carried pizza out of Naples was not fame or fashion. It was desperation. Between 1870 and 1970, more than 26 million Italians left the country in search of work. It was one of the largest mass migrations in modern history. Many of these emigrants were from the south, from Naples and the surrounding Campania region, and they took their food traditions with them wherever they went. In 1897, a baker from Naples named Gennaro Lombardi opened a small grocery store at 53 1⁄2 Spring Street in the Little Italy section of Manhattan. Of the roughly 2 million Italians who arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1910, thousands of them ended up packed into the tenement buildings of Lower Manhattan, in a neighborhood that locals called Mulberry Bend. Lombardi's store served this community. It was part grocery, part meeting place. Italian immigrants would come in to buy supplies, catch up on news from home, and hear the latest gossip. But Lombardi also started baking tomato pies in a coal-fired oven, wrapping them in paper and tying them with string, and selling them to factory workers who needed a cheap lunch. The pies were so popular that by 1905, Lombardi turned his grocery store into a full-time pizzeria. It is recognized by the Pizza Hall of Fame as the first pizzeria in the United States, though some recent research suggests there may have been earlier ones that simply went undocumented. What is interesting is that Lombardi had to adapt. He could not get the same ingredients he would have used in Naples. There was no buffalo mozzarella, so he used cow's milk mozzarella instead. Wood-fired ovens were expensive and hard to build, so he used a coal-powered oven. These changes were the beginning of what would eventually become a completely different style of pizza, the New York slice that millions of people eat today. Some of Lombardi's employees went on to open their own places that became famous in their own right. Totono's opened in Coney Island in 1924. John's of Bleecker Street opened in the West Village in 1929. Patsy's opened in Harlem in 1933. But even with this small network of pizzerias growing in New York, pizza was still an ethnic food, something Italian immigrants ate in their own neighborhoods. Mainstream America had no idea what it was. In 1939, the New York Herald Tribune felt the need to explain to its readers what pizza was and how to pronounce it. They spelled it out phonetically That is how unknown pizza still was outside of Italian communities, just 80-some years ago. So, what changed? What turned pizza from an obscure immigrant dish into the most eaten food in the country? The answer is World War II. In July of 1943, Allied troops stormed the beaches of Sicily and began fighting their way up the Italian peninsula. Over the next two years, hundreds of thousands of American and British soldiers were stationed across Southern Italy, and their daily reality was grim. They were surviving on K-rations, military food packages that were designed for short-term use but ended up being their main source of calories for months on end. The rations were repetitive, bland, and most soldiers could not stand them. But Southern Italy was pizza country. Naples and the towns around it had been serving pizza from street stalls and small shops for over a century and a half. And when these soldiers, exhausted and underfed, tasted real Neapolitan pizza for the first time, something clicked. It was hot. It was filling. It was simple and satisfying in a way that K-rations could never be. They loved it immediately. When those soldiers came home after the war ended, they brought their new appetite with them. They wanted pizza, and they did not just want it in the Italian neighborhoods of New York and Boston and Chicago, where it had always existed. They wanted it in their hometowns, in suburbs, in small cities that had never seen a pizza in their lives. This demand caught most of the country completely off guard. Restaurateurs outside of Italian communities had no idea how to make pizza, but they figured it out fast because the market was screaming for it. One statistic makes the scale of this shift clear. Between 1948 and 1956, oregano sales in the United States rose by more than 5,000 percent. 5,000 percent. That is not a gradual trend. That is a cultural earthquake. Pizza was no longer ethnic food. It was American food, and the business world noticed. The 1950s saw the first pizza chains appear. Shakey's Pizza opened in Sacramento in 1954. Pizza Hut followed in 1958, started by two brothers named Dan and Frank Carney in Wichita, Kansas, who borrowed $600 from their mother to open a small restaurant in a building so tiny that the sign could only fit nine characters, which is how the name Pizza Hut came about. Domino's came along in 1960. These chains did something that the old neighborhood pizzerias never could. They standardized, they franchised, they put pizza into suburbs and small towns where no Italian immigrant had ever set foot. And then came frozen pizza, which took the dish out of restaurants entirely and put a version of it into every grocery store freezer in the country. By the late 1950s and into the 60s, pizza was appearing on television, in advertisements, in movies. It became the food you ordered on Friday night, the food you ate at kids' birthday parties, the food you grabbed after a late shift at work. It went from something most Americans had literally never heard of to something they could not imagine their lives without, all in the span of about 15 years. That is one of the fastest cultural adoptions of a food in modern history. The pizza that conquered America was already very different from the pizza that the Lazzaroni had eaten on the streets of Naples two centuries earlier. New York had its thin, foldable slices. Chicago developed its deep dish style with thick walls of crust and layers of cheese. Detroit created a rectangular pizza baked in blue steel pans, originally used in auto factories. And as American pizza spread around the world, the dish kept evolving in every country that touched it. Every culture that adopted pizza made it their own. In Japan, a popular variety is topped with mayonnaise, corn, and potato. In France, you can order pizza with a fried egg cracked right on top. In Brazil, pizza comes with green peas and hearts of palm. In India, paneer and tandoori chicken are standard toppings. In Sweden, they put banana and curry on pizza, which either sounds brilliant or criminal depending on who you ask. Each of these variations would probably horrify a traditional Neapolitan pizza maker, but they are also proof of exactly why pizza became a global food. It is endlessly adaptable. You can put almost anything on a flatbread with sauce and cheese, and it works. The same quality that made pizza perfect for the Lazzaroni, its simplicity and flexibility, is the quality that made it perfect for the entire world. Today, pizza is not just popular. It is woven into the daily routine of hundreds of millions of people. More than 5 billion pizzas are consumed worldwide every single year. In the United States alone, there are over 70,000 pizzerias, making up more than 17% of all restaurants in the country. About 93% of Americans report eating pizza in any given month. 1 in 8 Americans is eating pizza on any given day. The average American puts away about 46 slices per year, which comes out to roughly 23 pounds of pizza annually per person. The industry generates tens of billions of dollars in the United States alone, and the global market is projected to keep growing for the foreseeable future. Pizza is the food people turn to when they are celebrating and the food they turn to when they are exhausted. It is the default choice when nobody in the group can agree on what to order. And then, in 2017, something happened that would have been unthinkable to those food writers who refused to put pizza in their cookbooks. UNESCO, the United Nations' cultural body, officially added the art of Neapolitan pizza, making to its representative list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The craft of the pizzaiolo, the traditional Neapolitan pizza maker, was recognized as a cultural practice worth preserving for future generations. 2 million people signed a petition supporting the bid. When the announcement came, Italy's Minister of Agriculture called it a victory. Famous pizza makers in Naples handed out free pizza in the streets to celebrate. A massive public event was held in the central Piazza del Gesù in Naples, where over a hundred pizzaioli showed up and baked more than 5,000 pizzas for the crowd. Think about that for a second. The same food that Italy's own cookbook authors refused to print. The same food that a famous American inventor compared to sewer bread. The same food that the upper classes treated like a source of national shame for well over a century. That food is now officially protected by the United Nations as a treasure of human culture, listed alongside the Mediterranean diet, French gastronomy and Belgian beer culture. About 3,000 pizzaioli live and work in Naples today, carrying on a tradition that stretches all the way back to those street vendors who walked through the slums with wooden boxes under their arms, selling lard and garlic flatbreads to people who could barely afford to eat. Young apprentices in Naples still learn the craft by watching a master pizzaiolo at work, just as they did generations ago. And the cycle keeps repeating. Every generation in every country discovers pizza as if it were brand new, because in some real way, for them, it is. The story of pizza is really a story about what happens when you stop judging food by who eats it and start judging it by how it tastes. For over a century, pizza was dismissed because it belonged to the wrong people. The ingredients were too cheap, the preparation was too fast, the customers were too poor, and every single one of those things turned out to be a strength, not a weakness. Cheap ingredients meant that anyone on earth could afford it. Fast preparation meant it could fit into any lifestyle, from a busy factory worker in 1800 Naples to a college student at 2 in the morning in 2026. And the desperation of the Lazzaroni, those ragged workers who were too hungry to care about what the educated classes said, meant they were willing to try a tomato that the rest of Europe thought was poisonous. That willingness gave pizza the one ingredient that made it legendary. Everything that the elite looked down on turned out to be exactly what made pizza unstoppable. The poverty was the recipe. If you enjoyed this story, go ahead and subscribe to the channel and drop a like on this video, and leave a comment telling us what your go-to pizza order is, because we genuinely want to know.