I can bet that you love the circle shaped food called pizza, especially when it is freshly out of oven or delivery box. We have been tasting pizza for more than 4 centuries now. It spread from Naples in Italy to nearly every corner of the world.
In the beginning, Pizza was rather modest than rich like we know it these days. Usually it came with tomatoes, olive oil and oregano on the top. Explanation is clear that originally pizza was food mainly for the poor harbor workers from Naples who couldn’t afford to pay for fancy ingredients like cheese or salami.
Recession in Italy forced the Italians to try their luck somewhere else which was the main reason for spreading pizza across the globe. United States was the first followed by Brazil.
Between 1700 and 1800, pizza was consolidated as one of the favorite dishes of the Neapolitan people, once again one of the most important of the culinary tradition of the city. That is when they started to define its characteristics and the places destined to their confection, the pizzerias.
In the 1700s, the pizza was made in wood ovens to be sold in the streets of the city, an apprentice who balanced the stove on the head, consigned directly to the purchasers of the pizzas, already made with different ingredients and condiments, and he carried them communicating his arrival with a characteristic call.
Between 1700 and 1800, the custom of savoring the pizza in these ovens, as well as in the streets or in the houses, is a testimony to the growing favor that this food had that was already among the favorite dishes of the diet of the Neapolitan people.
The wood stove, the marble bench where it is made, the shelf where the ingredients that will be fundamental components of the different varieties, the tables where the customers eat it, the external exhibition of pizzas by the passer-by, all elements that still are found in the Neapolitan pizzerias. This is how the first dynasties of Neapolitan pizzerias were born. In 1780, the pizzeria was founded whose tradition after two centuries still continues.