The pizza margherita was invented in Naples in 1889. It has three ingredients on top: tomato, mozzarella, basil. Add anything else and you have left the religion.
I am not from Naples, but I have been there four times, and on each visit I have eaten the margherita at least once a day. By trip three I started to understand what they were doing. By trip four I started to suspect I would never make a good one at home, no matter how many books I read or pizza stones I bought.
This is a piece about why.
The story
The story everyone tells is that in 1889 the chef Raffaele Esposito of Pizzeria Brandi made a pizza for Queen Margherita of Savoy in the colors of the Italian flag — red tomato, white mozzarella, green basil — and named it after her. It is a charming story. It is also probably partially invented. There were tomato-and-cheese pizzas in Naples decades before. The flag-coloring was likely retrofitted as a patriotic gesture during a moment of nationalist fervor.
But the date is approximately right, and the place is exactly right. Naples is where the pizza became what we now mean by “pizza.” It was originally a flatbread of the poor — eaten in the street, folded in four, sold cheap. The addition of tomato (from the New World, late 17th century) and buffalo mozzarella (from the Campanian plain) created the form we now consider canonical.
The Neapolitans took this seriously enough to register an official specification in 2004. The Vera Pizza Napoletana certification requires:
- Dough made with type 00 flour, water, salt, and fresh yeast or sourdough starter
- A hydration of 55 to 62 percent
- A 24-hour minimum fermentation
- Hand-stretched, never rolled, with a thick raised cornicione (crust edge)
- San Marzano tomatoes from the volcanic soil around Vesuvius
- Fior di latte or mozzarella di bufala
- Fresh basil, salt, olive oil
- Baked in a wood-fired oven at 485 degrees Celsius for 60 to 90 seconds
The specification is twenty-two pages long. There is a separate twelve-page document on the correct hand-stretching motion.
What you taste
A proper Neapolitan margherita does not look like the pizza you ate as a child.
The crust is thick at the edge and thin in the middle. The middle is wet — not floppy from being undercooked, but wet from the tomatoes that have released their juice during the brief, intense bake. The cheese is in irregular puddles that have melted in the heat but not browned. The basil is fresh, not dried, and goes on after the bake. The bottom of the crust is leopard-spotted with black char marks. This is correct. The dough is meant to be tender, not crisp.
You eat it with a knife and fork. In Naples, the working-class tradition is “a portafoglio” — folded into a wallet, like a small calzone — but in the pizzerias you cut it. The first bite is hot, almost too hot. The second bite is when the flavors arrive. The acidity of the tomato, the milky fat of the mozzarella, the perfume of the basil. They are not blended. They are layered, distinct.
Where to eat it
The famous places are famous for a reason. The wait at Da Michele is notorious — sometimes two hours — but they make exactly two pizzas (margherita and marinara), both excellent, and they cost less than ten euros. Sorbillo on Via dei Tribunali has the same dynamic.
The less-famous places are often as good. My favorite is Pizzeria Di Matteo, also on Via dei Tribunali, where I have never waited more than fifteen minutes and the pizza is as good as anywhere I have eaten.
Outside the historic center, La Notizia (two locations in the Vomero neighborhood) is the temple for the more refined, modern Neapolitan style. Pizzeria Starita in Materdei has been making the same pizzas since 1901. Concettina ai Tre Santi is the next-generation modernist, with a tasting menu of pizzas.
You cannot eat badly in Naples. Even the worst pizza is better than 90% of pizza elsewhere.
Why it does not work at home
I have made pizza at home for ten years. I have a baking steel. I have made my own poolish starters. I have ordered San Marzano tomatoes from Italy. I have learned to stretch dough without rolling it.
My pizza is good. It is not what I ate in Naples.
The reason, I think, is the heat. A home oven goes to 250 degrees Celsius, maybe 290 with a pizza steel preheated for an hour. A Neapolitan wood oven runs at 485. The difference is not incremental. It changes what the dough does, what the cheese does, what the tomato does. At 485, the pizza is done in 90 seconds and the moisture has nowhere to go but up — the crust puffs, the middle stays soft, the cheese melts but does not fry.
You cannot achieve this at home. You can get close, but the gap between close and Naples is the gap between a good restaurant meal and someone’s grandmother’s cooking. The ingredients are similar. The technique is documented. The result is different.
This is, in the end, why people go to Naples.
The lesson
There is a kind of food that exists only in its place. You cannot import it. You cannot recreate it. You have to go there.
The Neapolitans understand this. They are proud of their pizza in a way that is almost protective. They have rules about it. They will correct you politely if you order a pineapple. They have organizations dedicated to its preservation.
But under the rules and the certification and the seriousness, the actual experience of eating one is wildly informal. A loud restaurant, paper placemats, a glass of Aglianico, the pizza in front of you in seven minutes, hot from the oven, perfect.
The religion is not in the rules. The religion is in the eating.