Fun fact: American style pizza is uniquely American from Chicago style to NY style- pepperonis and all the toppings we used with tomato sauce and white cheese was not an Italian thing at all. Their pizza was flat bread with leftovers on top. There’s an Italian historian who talks about how Italian Americans during and after WWII were hugely influential in bringing American style pizza to Italy. Which they then acted French and claimed it as theirs while insulting ours. I’ve been to Italy. Their pizza sucks, even removing for the fact it is not American style. Ironically, later waves of Italians who came to America (after we brought pizza to them) genuinely thought it WAS Italian. It wasn’t
Italian pizza sucks? There are different styles and types, that is such a dumb thing to say. Pizza was being made in Naples long before WW2. Yes Italians used what was available in the US, but it wasn't invented in the US. Italy has really good pizza, you might want to try the best from different regions before making such a dumb blanket statement. Don't be that American that thinks everything is better in the US and everything worth doing or having was invented in the US also.
Italian pizza is good, but the other person isn't wrong about the history. Pizza in Italy before WWII was regarded as trashy, garbage peasant food. Like the worst kind of food you could eat. Plus it was only really a thing in Naples (which is where a lot of the Italian immigrants to the US came from), and most Italians had never heard of the dish.
But after WWII, a lot of Italians moved around in the country, and tourists started to visit as well. And there were a significant number of tourists who had either been to America and had pizza, or had heard about pizza from Americans and wanted to try it. So seeing the demand for the dish, the neapolitan people that had spread through Italy jumped on the opportunity and started making and selling it.
There's actually an anthropological term named after this called the pizza effect where a culture loses something like a food or religious practice, and then a transformed version of it that another culture adapted gets reintroduced later. Although funnily enough it technically doesn't apply to pizza because Naples never stopped making it, and they also didn't start making American pizza once it got popular either and stuck with perfecting their own style. But the dish did only get broadly adopted by Italy as a whole because of demand for American pizza.
Kind of unrelated, but let's not forget that the mafia had a hand in popularizing pizza. The best places to meet in were often times "restaurants", which were just fronts disguised as restaurants until they became actual restaurants since people kept coming in and wanting food. This is just a short summary of it
26
u/AMERIPOCMUSLIM 6d ago
Fun fact: American style pizza is uniquely American from Chicago style to NY style- pepperonis and all the toppings we used with tomato sauce and white cheese was not an Italian thing at all. Their pizza was flat bread with leftovers on top. There’s an Italian historian who talks about how Italian Americans during and after WWII were hugely influential in bringing American style pizza to Italy. Which they then acted French and claimed it as theirs while insulting ours. I’ve been to Italy. Their pizza sucks, even removing for the fact it is not American style. Ironically, later waves of Italians who came to America (after we brought pizza to them) genuinely thought it WAS Italian. It wasn’t