The pizza Margherita probably wasn't invented for a queen at all
The famous tale says a Naples baker created the Margherita in 1889 to honour Queen Margherita with tomato, mozzarella and basil in the colours of the flag. Yet a writer described that exact combination in 1830, no newspaper of the time reported the royal visit, and the story was promoted only in the 1930s and 1940s.
Flatbreads with toppings are ancient. Persian soldiers under Darius the Great reportedly baked bread with cheese and dates on their shields in the 6th century BCE, Greeks topped a flatbread called plakous with herbs, garlic and cheese, and a painting of a Roman topped bread survives at Pompeii. The word pizza itself is first recorded in 997 CE at Gaeta and may derive from a dialect word for clamp. By the 16th century, some Neapolitan galettes went by that name as cheap street food for the poor, not yet anything a respectable kitchen would record.
The decisive ingredient came from the Americas. Tomatoes reached the Spanish-ruled Kingdom of Naples, and by the late 18th century poor Neapolitans were spreading them on their yeasted flatbreads. The marinara, topped with tomato, garlic, oregano and olive oil, supposedly takes its name from fishermen's wives. Pizza was first sold by bakeries to eat on the move, until sit-down pizzerias appeared: Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba in 1830 and another on largo della Carita in 1833. Archives show 54 pizzerias in Naples in 1807, rising to 120 later in the century. Surprisingly, many Italian pizzas stayed sweet until around 1900; Pellegrino Artusi's classic cookbook gave three pizza recipes, all sweet, before adding a Neapolitan one on a typed sheet in 1911.
Naples now guards the dish closely. A true Neapolitan pizza association founded in 1984 requires a wood-fired domed oven, dough shaped by hand rather than rolled, and a pizza no wider than 35 centimetres. The European Union granted pizza napoletana protected status in December 2009, and UNESCO listed the craft as intangible heritage in December 2017. Rome, by contrast, prefers a thin crisp base, and pizza al taglio is baked in trays and sold by weight.
Immigrants carried pizza to America in the late 19th century. Records place Giovanni Albano's pizzeria on Mulberry Street in Manhattan in 1894, overturning the long-repeated claim that Gennaro Lombardi opened the first American pizzeria in 1905.
Source: History of pizza
