Somewhere around 5 billion pizzas are eaten every year. That number is almost meaningless, so try it this way: roughly 13 percent of Americans eat pizza on any given day. Not in a week. On any given day. Pizza is not a meal anymore. It’s ambient. It’s background noise. It’s the thing that shows up when you can’t decide what to order.
And yet nobody invented it. That’s the honest answer. Pizza crept into existence across several thousand years, through several different civilizations, without anyone sitting down and deciding to invent it. What we call pizza today is the result of a tomato arriving in the wrong country, being feared for about two centuries, and then slowly finding its way onto bread that poor people in Naples were already eating. The story is messier than the mythology.
Flatbreads With Toppings: The Oldest Food in the World
Before there was pizza, there was flatbread with stuff on it. This is one of humanity’s oldest cooking instincts, and almost every ancient culture arrived at it independently.
Persian soldiers serving under Darius the Great in the 6th century BCE reportedly baked flatbreads on their battle shields over open fires, topping them with cheese and dates. It wasn’t pizza. It was field rations. But the logic is identical: take flat dough, apply heat, put food on top of it.
Ancient Greece had a dish called plakous, a flatbread flavored with herbs, onion, cheese, and garlic. The Romans adapted this into their own version, adding toppings to focaccia-style bread they called panis focacius. In Pompeii, archaeologists have found frescoes depicting what appears to be a flat bread with a raised crust, placed on a table beside what looks like fruit and spices. The ingredients are different. The structure is familiar.
None of these are pizza. But they’re all doing the same thing pizza does. Bread as a platform. Toppings as the point. The idea is older than Italy, older than Rome, older than writing.
The Word Itself: 997 CE, Gaeta, Italy
The oldest known written record of the word “pizza” dates to May 997 CE. It appears in a Latin document from the town of Gaeta, in what is now southern Italy, then part of the Byzantine Empire. The text is a lease agreement, and it specifies that a tenant must give the local bishop duodecim pizze, twelve pizzas, along with a pork shoulder and kidney, every Christmas and Easter.
Twelve pizzas. As a tax. To a bishop. In the year 997.
What those pizzas actually were, no one is sure. The word pizza likely comes from the Latin pinsere, meaning to pound or stamp, which is also the root of pinza, the Italian word for tongs or clamps. The connection is to the act of pressing dough flat. The document doesn’t describe the toppings, and it’s almost certain the 997 version bore little resemblance to what we’d recognize today. But the word exists, legally documented, in the 10th century.
Over the next several centuries, the word “pizza” appears in other documents across southern and central Italy, always referring to some form of flat bread. Modern pizza, the one with tomato sauce and cheese, was still centuries away. And there was a specific reason for the delay.
The Tomato Problem: Europe Was Afraid of Them
Tomatoes are native to western South America, most likely the Andes region. They were domesticated somewhere in Mexico or Central America, and the Spanish brought them to Europe during the Columbian Exchange in the 16th century. What happened next is one of the stranger episodes in food history.
Europe didn’t eat them. For about two centuries.
The problem was botanical. Tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, which also includes tobacco, belladonna, and several plants that will kill you. European botanists in the 16th century recognized the family resemblance and concluded, reasonably but incorrectly, that the fruit was probably toxic. The tomato was grown as an ornamental plant in wealthy gardens across Italy, France, and England. People looked at it. They did not eat it.
There’s a secondary theory worth mentioning. Wealthy Europeans ate from pewter plates, which had a high lead content. When you put acidic food like tomatoes on lead-containing pewterware, the acid leaches out the lead. Rich Europeans who tried tomatoes occasionally got sick, reinforcing the belief that the fruit was dangerous. Poor people, eating off wooden plates, had no such problem. And poor people in Naples, it turns out, were the ones who eventually started eating tomatoes.
By the mid-18th century, tomatoes had made it into Neapolitan cooking, at least among the lower classes. The combination with flatbread happened gradually, not in a single moment. Street vendors in Naples were selling simple flatbreads with toppings, cooked fast in wood-fired ovens and eaten on the go. Tomato was one topping among many. The poor ate it because it was cheap. The wealthy looked down on it for exactly the same reason.
Naples, the Pizza Capital That Almost Wasn’t
Modern pizza is a product of Naples in the 16th through 18th centuries. The city was one of the most densely populated in Europe, chronically poor, and home to a street food culture built around cheap, fast, filling food. The lazzaroni, the urban poor of Naples, needed to eat quickly and inexpensively. Flatbreads with toppings fit perfectly.
By the late 18th century, Neapolitan pizza was documented by travelers with a mixture of fascination and condescension. Samuel Morse, the American painter who later invented the telegraph, visited Naples in 1831 and described pizza as “a 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 had been taken reeking out of the sewer.”
He was describing what we would now recognize, roughly, as a pizza. He found it revolting.
What he was looking at was poor food. That was the point. Pizza in 18th-century Naples was the food of people who had almost nothing. It was street food, eaten folded, sold from open-air stalls in the city’s cramped vicoli. The first permanent pizzerias appeared in Naples in the early 19th century. Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, which claims to be the world’s oldest pizzeria still in operation, opened in 1830.
The Margherita Legend: Probably Not True
Here’s the thing: the most famous story about pizza is almost certainly exaggerated.
The legend goes like this. In June 1889, King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy were visiting Naples. A local pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito of the Pizzeria Brandi was summoned to prepare pizzas for the royal household. He made three versions. The queen’s favorite was the one topped with tomatoes, mozzarella, and fresh basil. The colors matched the Italian flag: red, white, and green. Esposito named it after her. Pizza Margherita was born.
There’s even a commemorative plaque on the wall of Pizzeria Brandi in Naples, placed in 1989 to mark the 100th anniversary. There’s a letter, supposedly written by a palace official, thanking Esposito for the royal pizzas.
But historians have pointed out several problems. The combination of tomato, mozzarella, and basil had already been documented in Naples decades earlier. Francesco De Bourcard described similar pizza toppings in 1866, twenty-three years before the queen’s supposed visit. Raffaele Esposito may well have made pizza for the royal household. But he almost certainly didn’t invent the combination he served. He named an existing pizza, probably for marketing purposes, after the queen. The story sold better than the pizza.
What Esposito did accomplish, real or embellished, was give pizza a royal seal of approval. The dish that had been food for the poor of Naples now had a queen’s name attached to it. That association mattered.
How Pizza Crossed the Atlantic
Pizza reached the United States through immigration. Between 1880 and 1920, roughly four million Italians emigrated to America, the majority of them from southern Italy. They brought their food with them.
Gennaro Lombardi opened what is generally considered the first American pizzeria at 53 1/3 Spring Street in Manhattan in 1905. Lombardi’s is still open today, though at a different address on the same street. The pizza was Neapolitan in style, coal-fired, sold whole, and eaten by the Italian immigrant community that lived nearby.
For the first few decades, pizza in America was essentially ethnic food. It stayed close to Italian immigrant neighborhoods in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago. Then World War II happened.
American soldiers stationed in Italy encountered pizza in large numbers for the first time. They came home with a taste for it. By the late 1940s and 1950s, pizza was spreading beyond Italian-American communities into the mainstream. Pizza Hut opened in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas. Domino’s followed in 1960 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The industrialization of pizza had begun.
And then pizza became something Italy had never intended it to be. Thick crusts, thin crusts, deep dish, stuffed crust, white pizza, dessert pizza, pizza with pineapple on it. The dish that Neapolitan street vendors sold for the price of a coin became a global food system that generates $128 billion in annual revenue. Italy looks at most of this with considerable discomfort.
What Pizza Actually Is
In 2009, Neapolitan pizza was registered by the European Union as a traditional speciality guaranteed (TSG) product, with strict rules about ingredients, dough preparation, and cooking method. In 2017, UNESCO added the art of making Neapolitan pizza to its list of intangible cultural heritage. Italy was, belatedly, putting formal walls around something that had already escaped into the world.
The honest answer to “who invented pizza” is: nobody, and everybody.
Persian soldiers had the idea first, in the most basic sense. Greek and Roman cooks developed it further. Neapolitan street vendors gave it the form we recognize. A South American plant that Europeans were afraid to eat for two hundred years became its defining ingredient. An Italian immigrant in Manhattan built the first American pizzeria. A Kansas pizza chain industrialized it. And somewhere in that chain, pizza stopped belonging to anyone.
That’s usually what happens to the best ideas. They outgrow their origins. They stop needing a single inventor. They become the kind of thing that seems like it must have always existed, because it fits human appetite so naturally that it’s hard to imagine life without it.
Somewhere around five billion times a year, we confirm that it does.
Conclusion
Pizza is not Italian, exactly. It’s not American. It’s not ancient, in the sense that anything before the 18th century would be unrecognizable on a modern table. What pizza is, more than anything, is an accumulation: of flatbread traditions that go back to antiquity, of a South American fruit that took two centuries to lose its European reputation as a poison, of Neapolitan poverty that turned cheap food into one of the best things humans have ever figured out how to cook.
Raffaele Esposito probably made a very good pizza. The story about Queen Margherita probably helped sell a lot of them. But the real inventors of pizza are the unnamed lazzaroni of 18th-century Naples who were too poor to eat anything else, and hungry enough to make it perfect.
Frequently Asked Questions About Who Invented Pizza
Who invented pizza?
No single person invented pizza. The dish evolved over centuries from ancient flatbread traditions in Persia, Greece, and Rome, through medieval Italian flatbreads, to the tomato-topped version developed by street vendors in Naples between the 16th and 18th centuries. Raffaele Esposito of Pizzeria Brandi in Naples is often credited with creating Pizza Margherita in 1889, but that combination of tomato, mozzarella, and basil had already been documented in Naples decades earlier.
Why did it take so long for tomatoes to appear on pizza?
Tomatoes were introduced to Europe from South America in the 16th century, but Europeans feared them for roughly two centuries because the tomato plant belongs to the nightshade family, which includes several toxic species. European botanists assumed tomatoes were poisonous, and the fruit was grown as ornamental decoration rather than food. It was poor communities in Naples, eating from wooden plates rather than lead-containing pewter, who first embraced tomatoes as food. By the mid-18th century, tomatoes had become a common ingredient in Neapolitan street cooking, including early pizzas.
Is the Pizza Margherita story true?
Probably not entirely. The popular legend holds that pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito invented pizza Margherita in 1889 for Queen Margherita of Savoy, deliberately using tomato, mozzarella, and basil to represent the Italian flag. However, the combination of those three toppings was already documented in Naples by 1866, more than twenty years before the royal visit. Esposito likely named an existing pizza after the queen, but he almost certainly did not invent the recipe. The story was good for business. It may have also been good for pizza’s social status.
When did pizza arrive in the United States?
Pizza arrived in the United States with Italian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gennaro Lombardi opened what is considered the first American pizzeria in Manhattan in 1905. For several decades, pizza remained primarily within Italian-American communities. Its spread to the American mainstream accelerated after World War II, when soldiers returning from Italy brought a taste for it home. Pizza Hut opened in 1958, and Domino’s in 1960, marking the beginning of the mass-market pizza industry.
What is the oldest written record of the word pizza?
The oldest known written record of the word “pizza” appears in a Latin document from May 997 CE, from the town of Gaeta in southern Italy. The document is a lease agreement specifying that a tenant must pay the local bishop twelve pizzas each Christmas and Easter. The word likely derives from the Latin pinsere, meaning to pound or stamp, referring to the act of pressing dough flat. What those 10th-century pizzas actually consisted of is unknown, but they were almost certainly quite different from modern pizza.
Wagner Carvalho é a assinatura editorial do Optemil dedicada a análises técnicas de hardware, periféricos e ergonomia. Desenvolvedor de software que testa cada componente e método de manutenção sob condições reais de uso intensivo. Sem promessas teóricas: apenas a experiência prática de quem entende que a produtividade começa em um setup bem configurado. Saiba mais sobre nossa curadoria na página /about-us.