10/08/2026
Featured: Pizza of the Month (see last post)
The pizza of Naples was born not as a dish of luxury, but as food for ordinary people. In the narrow streets of the city, pizza was inexpensive, filling, and easily prepared from a small number of ingredients. By the nineteenth century, the Neapolitan pizzaiolo had developed a distinctive craft: a thin, supple disk of dough, stretched by hand and baked quickly in the intense heat of a wood-fired oven.
Among the simplest of these pizzas was the combination of tomato, mozzarella, basil, and olive oil that would eventually become known throughout the world as the Margherita. The familiar story places its naming in Naples in 1889, when Raffaele Esposito is said to have prepared a pizza for Queen Margherita of Savoy. The red tomato, white mozzarella, and green basil were interpreted as the colors of the newly unified Italian flag. Yet the history is less tidy than the legend suggests. Earlier descriptions indicate that these ingredients had already been appearing together on Neapolitan pizzas before the queen’s visit. Esposito’s significance, therefore, may have been less the invention of the pizza itself than its association with the queen and the name by which it would become famous.
