The word pizza is older than tomato sauce by centuries
A Latin note from Gaeta in 997 AD already mentions pizza, long before New World tomatoes. Today's dish—leavened flatbread with tomato, cheese, and toppings baked hot—is tied to Naples and often to Raffaele Esposito. By 2017 the global market hit about 128 billion dollars.
Classic Italian pizza is a flat wheat dough base topped and baked at high heat, traditionally in a wood oven. The name appears in a May 997 Latin manuscript from Gaeta, then on the Byzantine Empire's edge; a tenant owes the bishop twelve pizzas each Christmas Day and Easter Monday. Etymologists debate paths through Greek pitta, dialectal pinza from Latin pinsere to pound, or Lombardic bizzo meaning mouthful. English borrowed pizza in the 1930s; earlier speakers often said tomato pie.
Raffaele Esposito is frequently credited with shaping the modern Neapolitan style at the end of the nineteenth century. In 2009 Neapolitan pizza won Protected Traditional Specialty status in Europe. In Italy, restaurant pizza typically arrives whole and is eaten with knife and fork. Worldwide it fills pizzerias, street stalls, and delivery boxes. In 2017 the planet's pizza market was about 128 billion US dollars, with 44 billion in the United States across roughly 76,000 shops; about thirteen percent of Americans aged two and up ate pizza on any given day.
A pizzaiolo is the craftsperson at the peel. Regional cousins keep older names like tomato pie even as mozzarella-and-tomato icons dominate menus. Whether the root is Byzantine bread, Lombard bite, or Italian clamp, the dish's power is simple: inexpensive dough, fierce heat, and toppings that travel well across cultures. Few foods show so clearly how a medieval word can outlive its first meaning and still sell by the slice.
Source: Pizza
