What is the origin of pizza and who invented it?

Jaime Claure
3 min readJan 12, 2024

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This is his story we know that pizza is Italian, but its origin is much more interesting than it seems

Although we have all eaten it and know that pizza is Italian, we know little about its origin. Modern pizza originated in Naples, Italy, by Raffaele Esposito, who was commissioned to make a pizza in honor of Queen Margherita’s visit, but its creation was not spontaneous, previous situations had to occur to reach this moment.

What is known is that the ancient Greeks consumed flat breads with oils, herbs and cheese and possibly this bread was introduced in Magna Graecia or southern Italy by the first Greek settlers, so it was a dish that became popular in the towns. Lombards in the 12th century, where the word pizza was adopted to refer to “a small round and soft bread.”

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Regarding the origin of the word pizza, it is believed that it actually began to be used in 997 in the city of Gaeta, a term that for some comes from pinsa, from the Italian verb pinsere which means “to crush or crush”, although others consider that It comes from the Old German pizzo, since bizzopizzo means “piece of bread.”

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The origin of pizza
It was then that the Lombards changed the term pizzo to pizza and spread this tradition throughout the Mediterranean. According to some archaeological excavations, it has been determined that around the year 79 AD there were shops very similar to modern pizzerias in Pompeii.

Although pizza as it is known today would appear around the 17th century in Naples, Italy, and would have emerged among the most humble inhabitants of the city, who needed to eat cheap ingredients quickly. It is believed that at first bread was prepared with a cereal dough placed on stones in the sun, with a seasoning on top.

By the 16th century, the tomato, a product originally from Mexico, arrived in Europe through the mediation of the Spanish, although this ingredient was not accepted as a food until the end of the 17th century and it was not until then that it was adopted for the preparation of pizzas.

In the 18th century, the Port’Alba pizzeria was established in Naples, considered the first pizzeria in the world, although the creation of the dish was recorded by the writer Alexandre Dumas in his novel Le corrícolo (1843) where he describes that the lazzaroni or poorest inhabitants of the city, they had flatbread with various ingredients for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

In 1889, the Royal Palace of Capodimonte commissioned the Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito to create a pizza in honor of Queen Margherita, so the chef created three different ones, of which the queen preferred the one that had the colors of the Italian band, red. of the tomato, the green of the basil and the white of the mozzarella cheese.

For this reason it was named Pizza Margherita in honor of the queen and this Neapolitan pizzaiolo is considered its creator, although we have already seen that pizza has a long history and its creation corresponds to the hands of many more names. not recorded by history.

EXTRA DATA

Now all have new real mean of why we call pizza as name, volume formulation: Pi x Z² x a

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Jaime Claure
Jaime Claure

Written by Jaime Claure

Designer & System Engineer focus Digital Transformation / Data Science / Machine Learning. I help businesses growth their digital frontier from backend to UI/UX

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