Last week I blogged on the history of that classic Italian food, pasta. But say ‘Italian cuisine’ to most people and their likely response is ‘pasta and pizza’.  Though we may not eat the two together, still they are traditionally paired as the most popular of Italian foods.

Pizza, of course, has been wholeheartedly embraced by the Western world – particularly in America.  But take it from one who’s spent plenty of time in Italy, such as when I researched my novel The Echoes of Love, once you’ve eaten true Italian pizza, no other kind will do!

Here are some ‘pizza facts’:

• The first known documenting of the word pizza dates back to 997 AD. In the town of Gaeta in southern Italy it was written that a man gave the bishop twelve pizzas each Christmas, and twelve each Easter. Quite how one bishop ate twelve pizzas I don’t know!
• The heart of pizza history beats in Naples, Italy. It was there that cooks first became brave enough to sample tomato on their flatbreads – since the discovery of the fruit in  America in the sixteenth century people had believed that because it is a member of the nightshade family it was therefore poisonous.
• The world’s first pizzeria, Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, was opened in Naples in 1830. You can still eat there today; see www.anticapizzeriaristoranteportalba.com!
• Until the late nineteenth century, Italian pizza was generally a sweet, not savoury dish.
• Legend tells that the Margherita pizza was invented in 1889 when a pizza maker from Naples wanted to make for Margherita of Savoy, the Queen consort of Italy, a pizza to represent the national colours: tomatoes for the red, mozzarella for the white and basil for the green.
• Italian pizza ‘purists’ – of which there are many! – believe that only two kinds of pizza should be eaten: the Margherita and the Marinara, which is topped with oregano, garlic and extra virgin olive oil and is so called because it was made for sailors of the Bay of Napes by their wives (marinaras).
• The first American pizzeria, Lombardi’s, opened in 1905 on Spring Street in lower Manhattan. (It later moved premises, but it still trades today and uses the original pizza oven.) Pizza had arrived in the US thanks to mass emigration (some five million Italians had moved there by the year 1900, the majority from the south). But it wasn’t until the Second World War that Allied troops occupying Italian territory really fell in love with pizza, and brought that love home with them.
• The True Neapolitan Pizza Association (Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana) sets stringent rules for the creation of Neapolitan pizzas. These include kneading by hand, stretching to no more than 25 centimetres in diameter, and baking in a wood-fired oven. Some dedicated pizzerias in Naples make pizza-making something of a religion, going so far as to insist on only using San Marzano tomatoes from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius and to adding toppings in a clockwise direction!
• Probably the swankiest pizza in the world is on the menu at Nino’s Bellissima Pizza in Manhattan. The pizza is topped with caviar, lobster, salmon and wasabi paste, and will set you back no less than $1,000 dollars. Yes, that’s for just one pizza!
• And finally, the world record for the world’s largest pizza, named Ottavia for Rome’s first emperor Octavian Augustus, was set in 2012. Weighing a staggering 51,257 pounds and covering one-third of an acre, it contained 19,800 pounds of flour, 10,000 pounds of tomato sauce, 8,800 pounds of mozzarella cheese, 1,488 pounds of margarine, 551 pounds of rock salt, 220 pounds of lettuce and 55 pounds of vinegar. It took 48 hours to cook the pizza in more than 5,000 batches.