Inventing the Pizzeria

A History of Pizza Making in Naples

Antonio Mattozzi, Zachary Nowak, Zachary Nowak

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472586186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Pizza is one of the best-known and widely exported Italian foods and yet relatively little is known about its origins in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Myths such as the naming of pizza margherita after the Italian queen abound, but little serious scholarly attention has been devoted to the topic. Eschewing exaggerated fables, this book draws a detailed portrait of the difficulties experienced by the then marginalized class of pizza makers, rather than the ultimate success of their descendants. It provides a unique exploration of the history of pizza making in Naples, offering an archival-based history of the early story of pizza and the establishment of the pizzeria. Touching upon issues of politics, economics and sociology, Inventing the Pizzeria contributes not only to the commercial, social and food history of Italy but also provides an urban history of a major European city, told through one of its most famous edible exports. Originally published in Italian, this English edition is updated with a revised introduction and conclusion, a new preface and additional images and sources.

1

The origins of pizza and the pizzeria

The precise date that the first pizzeria opened in Naples is not known, nor do we know when the first pizzaiolo was called by that specific name.1 Their appearance falls under that category of social phenomena—in this case the search for new foods and new tastes—that initially escape the notice of chroniclers and are noticed and observed only when they are already established.

There were surely other types of pizza already produced in the eighteenth century, but they were most likely simple focaccia-type flatbreads prepared in taverns or in bread ovens with various ingredients, cooked on metal sheets or fried in pans. The actual trade of pizzaiolo, one which required a certain kind of shop and had to be done by specialized personnel, developed only in the middle of the eighteenth century. One way we can be sure about this chronology is to examine the hundreds of craft and trade guilds in Naples at that time, even humble guilds like the snack hawkers, undertakers, stable boys, macaroni sellers, fish fryers, the franfelliccari (hawkers of a typical Neapolitan dessert), oil vendors who traipsed around the city and tripemongers, to name just a few. Nowhere on these lists do we find pizzaioli: this absence means two things.

The first is that this specific professional category underwent a rather long process of identification because it was included and confused with the wine shop keepers, the tavern keepers and above all with the generic category of bakers. Pizzaioli shared with all these trades the passion and the ability to do one essential thing: prepare food. Perhaps then it was this initially vague identity, in addition to the small number of pizzaioli in the eighteenth century, which hindered the creation of a guild like so many other categories had.

The second thing that the absence means (a result of the first) was that by the time this process of identification had been completed, the guilds had lost their function. They did not draw new members, as they did not offer particular advantages for workers and were therefore already in decline. Leaving aside the guilds, we can see in a 1799 document that both pizzaioli and shops where pizzas were made and eaten were already in existence. This shop would only be called a “pizzeria” well after the middle of the nineteenth century, which underlines the slow development of this sector.

WHY NAPLES?

Matilde Serao, as cited in the preface, had the following to say about pizzerias outside of Naples:

One day a hardworking Neapolitan had an idea. Knowing that pizza was one of the culinary delights of Naples, and knowing that there were many Neapolitans in Rome, he decided to open a pizzeria in Rome. The copper of the bowls glistened, the oven burned continuously and all the pizzas were present: pizza with tomato, pizza with mozzarella, pizza with anchovies and oil, pizza with olive oil, oregano and garlic. At first a crowd came: then it waned. The pizza, removed from its Neapolitan environment, seemed off-key and was a symbol only of indigestion. Its star grew dark and set in Rome; an exotic plant, it died in solemn silence in the Eternal City. And indeed it is true: pizza is in that category of foods that are inexpensive and which is the breakfast or lunch of a large part of the Neapolitan population. The pizzaiolo has a shop where, during the night, he makes a large number of these flattened out discs, from a dense dough that burns but does not cook, and is covered with almost-raw tomatoes, with garlic, with oregano, with pepper: these pizzas are cut into many pieces that cost one soldo each are entrusted to a boy who walks around to sell them on the street, on a movable table. There he stays the whole day, with these slices of pizza which freeze in the cold, which turn yellow in the sun, eaten by the flies. There are also slices that cost two centesimi, for children going to school; when the supply is gone, the pizzaiolo fills the table back up, until late at night. There are also boys at night who carry a large convex tin container on their heads. They carry slices of pizza in them and give a special yell, saying that they have pizza with tomato and garlic, with mozzarella and salted anchovies. Poor women seated on the steps of their bassi buy some and have dinner, with this slice of pizza.2

In this page the insightful but combative writer summarizes quite efficiently almost all of the themes that someone who wants to analyze this particular aspect of nineteenth-century Neapolitan life has to tackle:

1.The particularity of pizza and the pizzeria to Naples.

2.The fact that pizza was for a very long time “adored” only by Neapolitans and not by others.

3.The umpteenth confirmation that the type of pizza that would be called “margherita” existed long before the supposed date of its birth, which instead goes back decades before 1889.

4.The popular, or even blue-collar, character of this dish.

The chroniclers of the age are in agreement that the Neapolitan “plebes” did not love to cook, but rather preferred to spend their miserable earnings in some greasy spoon, or buying something from one of the hundreds of food vendors who perambulated the city. What the chroniclers missed is that everyday the poor had to face the problem not just of buying food but of cooking it, because of the near-absence of not only bathrooms in the bassi and the fondaci, but also kitchens. The latter was sometimes improvised by a small cast-iron stove, placed on bricks, out on the street. If we remember that as late as 1902, Francesco P. Rispoli could note that “often the working man does not make food at home, where the angst and the discomfort hardly allow him to sleep, but rather looks to satisfy this necessity at a nearby dive,”3 it is easy to imagine the living conditions of most Neapolitans. This endemic situation, noted by all chroniclers and foreign visitors, was present in the whole period from the Spanish vice royalty through the Bourbon monarchy and even after the unification of Italy.

Indeed in Serao’s time, pizza, or at least a slice of it, was the lunch or dinner of many Neapolitans. Salvatore Di Giacomo, in one of his many articles (always brimming with moral tension), recounted the story of a needy family that had made a deal with a pizzaiolo. Each night, in exchange for a small coin, he gave them the crusts left by other customers during the day; these constituted a lavish dinner for the family.4 Pizza was often listed as one of the “foods of the poor” by Neapolitan doctors and other promoters of hygiene—including Achille Spatuzzi and Enrico De Renzi to name just two—who began to be interested in the eating habits of the lower classes of Naples before and after Italian unification.5 The success of pizza in Naples must be attributed to the simplicity of its preparation and to its delicious taste, as well as to poverty, to over population and to the extreme population density in the city.6

All of these factors are surely interdependent: because pizza at that time was a very inexpensive product (well known to be made from “poor” ingredients), in order to amortize the overhead of his shop’s rent as well as the wages of one or more boys (called garzoni) and of course earn his own income, the pizzaiolo had to produce a large number of pizzas every day. The sheer number and the density of people in Naples meant that not only could someone with a shop in the well-trafficked street, Via dei Tribunali (near the courthouse), or near the port, make hundreds of pizzas a day, but so could a pizzaiolo in one of the side streets. Even though the profit from each was small, the number of pizzas allowed the business to be economical. Thus an autocatalytic cycle was created: the low cost allowed the penetration of pizza into any social class, and a large part of the population could get by on pizza given its low cost and its availability.

Naturally the small margin was made up for by the service, the ingredients, and furnishings and fixtures, although this is in a more advanced phase with shops that had side rooms, to be discussed below. The small margin on each pizza also explains why these poor pizzaioli worked until late at night. One other point of departure that Serao’s comments on the pizza offer us is the actual denomination of this food, “pizza.” The pizza is at the heart of the problem: even if the aim of this book is to trace out the history of the pizzerias and the pizzaioli in the nineteenth century, it is only natural that it investigate their product, the pizza itself.

“PIZZA”: THE ORIGINS AND MEANINGS OF THE WORD

Today when we say “pizza” we know what everyone means: the “Neapolitan pizza” that is made at home or eaten in pizzerias, in Naples, in London, in Milan but also in New York. Pizza is a loaf of soft, fresh dough that Italian pizzaioli say is “crushed” (ammaccata), that is to say stretched out into a flat, round disc. It is then garnished with oil and tomatoes, and then with mozzarella, oregano, garlic, anchovies or whatever else is desired, and then cooked in an oven. But the word “pizza” in Italian is a generic term that refers to anything prepared and then crushed flat. In the literature of the past we can find numerous references to pizza, often indicating different things, both edible and otherwise: there is the “rustic pizza,” the “sweet pizza” (a cake), various types of focaccia, but even certain kinds of cheese and, in more recent (although rapidly disappearing) times, the container that held movie reels. There is even an expression in Italian, “to reduce something to a pizza,” in other words to squash or flatten something. The word can also be used to mean “boring” or “stuffy,” either attributed to a person or a thing that is annoying or boring, and in Italian one says “What a pizza!” (Che pizza!). A word that means one of the most exciting dishes in the current gastronomic universe can also define something diametrically opposed.

Perhaps precisely because of the multiple meanings, there have been numerous investigations into the etymology of the word: pistis, picea, pizzo, bizzo, pèza, petta, pitta … from Latin, from Greek, from a Germanic root or something else entirely. These conjectures across space and time have made people think that maybe pizza goes all the way back to the dawn of time, to prehistory or even to its invention by some mythological divinity, as some sort of dough made of water and flour, cooked on a flat surface or in a rudimentary oven. In poems, in mythological stories, in the ancient and medieval chronicles we find this word in its various forms, with one of its many meanings, including food-related ones.

But the questions that interest us are: when was Neapolitan pizza born? When did pizzerias first open? Who were the first pizzaioli? This is the heart of my research and these three interrogatives should not be separated, or else we risk talking about one of the other possible pizzas. Edmondo Cione, in a delicious chapter about Neapolitan pizza, gives this response to the same question:

If by “pizza” we mean a generic flatbread that in some countries is called “pizza,” I think that we need to go all the way back to primordial human civilization […] to the Neolithic, or even to the Paleolithic […] but it’s not about these pizzas that we want to speak, but rather that Neapolitan specialty worthy of Jove’s table, where it would have appeared had it not required the tomato […] which had been introduced to Europe from Peru in the sixteenth century but only really cultivated in the seventeenth. On the other hand, I don’t believe that pizza was well-known even in the eighteenth century given that I’ve never found any mention of it in all of th...