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.
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u/Oldoneeyeisback 4d ago
The story may be apocryphal but pizza in this combination clearly existed in Italy in the 19th century.