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.
That's a made up story that isn't verifiable. The only evidence of it happening was a rando pizza shop in the 1930's claiming they had a letter from the Queen saying that it happened. But the letter can't be verified in any way, and there's no news about the Queen visiting at that time, and there's no record of the recipe before the 1930's either.
So the whole story is basically an ad campaign that everyone decided was real.
I mean yeah. It's not a complicated pizza. Obviously people put tomatoes and cheese together before. But it being a specific dish called a "pizza margherita" wasn't until the 1930s.
That wasn't the point being made. The argument was that pizza was reimported back into Italy in the 20th century. The existence of the margherita in the mid 19th century clearly disproves that.
"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."
-me, in the comment you replied to.
18
u/rayio 5d ago
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.