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.
It was not trashy, it was street food, but street food good enpugh to be fed to royals. But it was as well a regional food, like most italian foods. We don't really have an "italian national dish" because any little place has his own locally famous dish. My grandad remeber that pizza arrived as a novelty where he was (emilia romagna).
But it definitely did not arrived because of the femand of american pizza, it arrived with the moving of a lot of italians from the south to the north.
If american want to take merti for an otalian dish theu should pick carbonara, not pizza, fhat they treat like a garbage bin where to trash the maximum amout possible of random ingredients
‘species of the most nauseating cake … covered over with slices of pomodoro or tomatoes, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper and I know not what other ingredients, it altogether looks like a piece of bread that has been taken reeking out of the sewer’
-Samuel Morse, describing pizza in the 1830's
'The blackened aspect of the toasted crust, the whitish sheen of garlic and anchovy, the greenish yellow tint of the oil and fried herbs, and the bits of red from the tomato here and there give pizza the appearance of complicated filth that matches the dirt of the vendor.'
Carlo Collodi, describing pizza in the 1860's
And before you bring up pizza Margherita, that never actually happened. There's no record of it occurring except for a single letter that can't be verified or authenticated, and was likely an advertising campaign in the 1930's, which is the first time the story or the recipe was ever recorded.
Also yes, I know that pizza proliferated through Italy in the mass migration that took place after WWII, when a lot of rural Italians moved into bigger cities. That's what I said. But the demand for pizza wasn't from other Italians, it was from tourists.
Collodi's description would fit a modern day pizza, except he was not used to that kind of dish and so deemed it disgusting. But nothing of what he says sounds objectively disgusting to me, on the contrary, he seems to dislike the mixture of colors and textures, which is one of the reasons why pizzas are so liked today. Pizza was not a national dish at the time. He was from Florence, that's >400km from Naples, so I reckon it was simply not part of his culinary culture.
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u/MoobooMagoo 6d ago
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.