History of Pizza

Pizza is a baked pie of Italian origin consisting of a shallow bread-like crust covered with seasoned tomato sauce, cheese, and often other toppings such as sausage or olive. It is an unknown fact that who exactly created pizza as its earliest origins are not at all clear, another fact is that pizza has gone through alot of different changes throughout the centuries.

It is said that historical records showed that people in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome all ate things that are very similar to our modern pizza crust.The word pizza may be a derivative of the Latin word picea, a word which the Romans used to describe the blackening of bread in an oven.

Formation of Pizza

Pizza most clearly took the form that we are now familiar with in pre-Renaissance Naples, a large city in central Italy. Poor peasants used their limited ingredients (wheat flour, olive oil, lard, cheese and natural herbs) to make a seasoned, flat bread garnished with cheese. Mozzarella cheese was one benefit of an invasion from Asian peoples, who brought the water buffalo to Italy. Today, the best mozzarella cheese is still made from water buffalo milk.

Modern pizza is attributed to baker Raffaele Esposito of Napoli (Naples) in the Italian region of Campania. In 1889, Esposito of Pizzeria di Pietro (now called Pizzeria Brandi) baked pizza especially for the visit of Italian King Umberto I and Queen Margherita. Due to this, Naples gradually assumed its reputation as having the finest pizza in Italy throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 19th century, pizza became a popular fast food.

Pizza of Today

The pizza we have today migrated to America with the Italians in the latter half of the 19th century. The first American pizzas were known as Tomato pie. The Americans love eating the pizzas and soon it became extremely popular in the country and they soon started companies that not are well known for their pizza. One perfect example is Pizza Hut.