The single most famous fact in pizza history is almost certainly a fabrication. The story you have probably heard — that in 1889 a Neapolitan pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito made a special pizza for Queen Margherita of Savoy, topped it with tomato, mozzarella and basil to mirror the Italian flag, and named it after her — rests on one piece of documentary evidence: a thank-you letter hanging on the wall of a Naples pizzeria. Historians who have examined that letter now believe it is a forgery, likely manufactured decades later by the restaurant’s owners when business was slow. Italy’s most iconic pizza origin story appears to be a marketing stunt that outlived everyone involved.
The actual history of pizza is less romantic and considerably more interesting. It is a story about poor people, street food, Italian immigration, two World Wars, and the particular genius of American fast food chains for taking someone else’s idea and scaling it to planetary dominance.
The Pizza Facts Most People Get Wrong
- The word “pizza” was first documented in writing in 997 CE in Gaeta, a coastal town south of Rome, though that early reference had nothing to do with tomato or cheese.
- Modern pizza as we know it — flatbread with tomato — developed in Naples between the 16th and 18th centuries, driven by poor working-class Neapolitans, not royal kitchens.
- The tomato, which most people think of as classically Italian, was brought to Europe from the Americas by Spanish explorers; when it first arrived, many Europeans believed it was poisonous.
- Before World War II, pizza was almost entirely unknown outside Italian immigrant neighbourhoods — in 1939 the New York Herald Tribune felt the need to explain to its readers what “peet-za” was and how to pronounce it.
- The pizza that dominates global menus today is not Neapolitan pizza. It is an American adaptation of Neapolitan pizza, significantly transformed by Italian immigrants who had to work with different ovens, different cheese and different customers.
How a Dish This Global Started as Food the Upper Classes Refused to Touch
Pizza is now a roughly 150-billion-dollar global industry. It is eaten on every inhabited continent, customised into hundreds of regional variations, and served from wood-fired restaurants charging twenty-five dollars a pie and from frozen food aisles charging two. Understanding how it got from Naples street food to that kind of scale requires confronting an uncomfortable fact: the pizza the world eats is not really Italian. It is American.
The history of pizza matters to anyone who eats it today because the dish they are eating tells a specific story about migration, adaptation and cultural transformation. Authentic Neapolitan pizza — protected since 2017 by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage — is a precise, labour-intensive product with strict rules about dough, tomatoes, mozzarella and wood-fired oven temperature. The pizza most people eat bears only a passing resemblance to that original. Knowing where the gap came from, and why, changes the experience of eating either version.
Where Pizza Actually Appears First in the Historical Record
The modern history of pizza begins with poverty, not royalty. Naples in the 18th century was one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, with a large underclass of working poor known locally as the lazzaroni. These were the people who needed cheap, fast, portable food that could be eaten standing up. Flatbread with toppings — sold by street vendors and small bakeries — was the answer. This is documented: by 1807, city records show 54 registered pizzerias operating in Naples, a number that doubled within a few decades.
The word “pizza” itself is older. It appears in a Latin manuscript in Gaeta in 997 CE, though that reference describes something closer to a flatbread tax payment than a dish anyone would recognise today. The more recognisable precursor is the Roman panis focacius, a flat, oil-dressed bread that is essentially the ancestor of modern focaccia.
What transformed Neapolitan flatbread into something approaching modern pizza was the tomato, and the tomato’s arrival in southern Italy was neither smooth nor immediate. Brought to Europe from the Americas by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, the tomato spent roughly two centuries being regarded with deep suspicion. Wealthy Europeans thought it might be poisonous. The poor of Naples, who had less to lose from experimenting, started eating it anyway. By the late 18th century, tomato-topped flatbread had become a staple of working-class Neapolitan life.
Notably, the upper classes wanted nothing to do with it. Contemporary writers described pizza as disgusting food for people too poor to eat properly. It took the dish roughly a century to shed that association, which makes the Queen Margherita story — royal endorsement elevating a peasant food — a very useful piece of marketing, whether or not it actually happened.
The Margherita Myth, the Forged Letter, and What the Evidence Actually Shows
The Margherita story goes like this. In June 1889, King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy visited Naples. The Queen, tired of French cuisine, summoned the city’s most famous pizzaiolo, Raffaele Esposito, to cook for her. He made three pizzas. She loved the one with tomato, mozzarella and basil. He named it after her, and a royal representative sent him a thank-you letter confirming her delight. That letter still hangs in Pizzeria Brandi in Naples today.
There are several problems with this story.
Historian Zachary Nowak examined that letter and concluded it is a forgery. The seal does not match royal documents of the period. The handwriting is inconsistent with other letters from the supposed author. The name on the letter — “Raffaele Esposito Brandi” — combines Esposito’s name with that of the family who later bought his restaurant, the Brandi brothers, who took over during the 1930s when times were hard. The most plausible explanation, according to research into the restaurant’s history, is that the Brandi brothers manufactured the letter sometime after acquiring the pizzeria to give their business a royal pedigree.
There is also a logistical problem that nobody in the romantic telling ever mentions. In 1889, Queen Margherita was staying at the Capodimonte Palace on a hill above the city. Esposito’s pizzeria was in the Chiaia district below. The idea that a pizzaiolo simply popped up to the palace — or that the queen casually descended for street food — does not fit with the security protocols and social norms of a 19th-century royal visit.
The honest assessment: Raffaele Esposito was a real person who owned a real pizzeria. King Umberto and Queen Margherita genuinely visited Naples in 1889. A pizza named Margherita existed. But the specific story — the royal summons, the three pizzas, the patriotic basil, the letter — almost certainly did not happen the way it has been told for over a century. The Association for True Neapolitan Pizza, when formalising the rules for EU recognition, placed the Margherita’s origin between 1796 and 1810, not 1889, acknowledging that the dish existed before the famous encounter supposedly created it.
The Brandi family produced a better marketing campaign than most modern agencies could manage. They just had a head start of about ninety years.
From Naples to New York: The Immigration That Changed Everything
Pizza left Italy the way most things left southern Italy in the late 19th century: on the backs of people who had no other options. Between 1870 and 1970, more than 26 million Italians emigrated, the majority of them from the impoverished south. Neapolitan and Sicilian immigrants flooded into New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, bringing their food with them.
The Spring Street address in Manhattan’s Little Italy is associated with America’s first commercial pizzeria, licensed in 1905 under the name of Gennaro Lombardi. The full story is messier than that. Historian Peter Regas, presenting research in 2019 at the U.S. Pizza Museum in Chicago, found that Gennaro Lombardi first arrived in America in November 1904 at age seventeen, classified as a labourer. If he was involved with the Spring Street pizzeria in 1905, he was almost certainly an employee, not the owner. Earlier Italian immigrants, including a figure named Filippo Milone, appear to have been running pizzerias on that same street before Lombardi’s name was attached to the licence. The “first pizzeria in America” story, it turns out, has the same problem as the Margherita story: the tidy version credits one person for what was really a collective development.
What is clear is that the pizzas made by these early New York establishments were already different from Neapolitan originals. The coal-fired ovens of New York ran hotter and faster than the wood-fired ovens of Naples. Buffalo mozzarella was unavailable, replaced by fior di latte made from cow’s milk. The pies grew larger. Workers ate them folded in half on the street, which is how the New York fold was born: not a style choice, but a practical response to a large pizza and no plate.
The next transformation was Chicago. Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo opened Pizzeria Uno in 1943, introducing deep-dish pizza — a thick, high-sided pie filled rather than topped, more casserole than flatbread. When Neapolitan purists eventually discovered what Chicago had done to their dish, the reaction was not warm. It remains diplomatically sensitive to this day.
The War, the Oregano Boom, and How Pizza Went Mainstream
For the first four decades of the 20th century, pizza in America was immigrant food. It stayed in Italian neighbourhoods. Non-Italian Americans largely did not eat it. Then World War II happened.
American soldiers fought through Italy from 1943 onward in the Allied Italian Campaign. Hundreds of thousands of them were stationed across the country for extended periods. They ate pizza because it was there, cheap and available, and many of them liked it. When they came home, they wanted it again. Between 1948 and 1956, sales of oregano in the United States increased by more than 5,000 percent. That is not a typo. Five thousand percent. Nothing explains that number except returning soldiers craving the flavours of Italian food.
The infrastructure followed the demand. In 1945, GI Ira Nevin returned from service in Italy and joined his family’s oven-building business in New York. The Nevin family built the first gas-fired, ceramic-deck Bakers Pride pizza oven: easier to produce, easier to install, and accessible to anyone who wanted to open a pizzeria without sourcing specialist bricklayers. The artisanal barrier to entry dropped significantly.
Shakey’s Pizza opened in 1954. Pizza Hut launched in Wichita, Kansas in 1958. Little Caesars opened in Michigan in 1959. Domino’s followed in 1960, also in Michigan. These chains industrialised what had been a craft product and pushed it into every suburb, campus and strip mall in the country. By the 1970s and 1980s, American-style pizza chains were opening internationally, which is how the world came to understand pizza primarily through the American template rather than the Neapolitan one.
It is slightly ironic that Italy, the country that gave the world pizza, spent several decades watching the world eat a version of it that Italian pizzaiolos would not fully recognise.
Pizza History Timeline
| Period | Location | What Existed | Key Development | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 997 CE | Gaeta, Italy | First written record of the word “pizza” | Latin manuscript reference | Documentary baseline; not yet the dish we know |
| 16th century | Naples | Flatbread eaten by the poor; tomatoes arrive from the Americas | Spanish explorers bring tomatoes; initially believed poisonous | The key ingredient arrives, eventually |
| Late 18th century | Naples | Tomato-topped flatbread sold as street food | Working-class Neapolitans begin eating tomato pizza | The recognisable modern form appears |
| 1807 | Naples | 54 registered pizzerias in city records | Pizza enters formal commercial record | Documented evidence of pizza as an established business |
| 1843 | Naples / Italy | Writer Alexandre Dumas describes pizza toppings in his travel writing | First major literary documentation | Cross-cultural written record of the dish |
| 1889 | Naples | The Margherita story occurs, or does not | A pizza is named Margherita; whether a queen ate it is disputed | The origin myth that shaped global pizza identity |
| 1905 | New York City | First licensed pizzeria in the United States, associated with Spring Street address | Italian immigrants bring commercial pizza to America | The American pizza story begins |
| 1943 | Chicago | Pizzeria Uno opens, introduces deep-dish pizza | Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo create a new format | Pizza diverges significantly from its Neapolitan origin |
| 1943–1945 | Italy | American soldiers stationed during Italian Campaign eat pizza | Post-war demand creates a mass market | The single biggest driver of pizza’s mainstream American adoption |
| 1958 | Wichita, Kansas | Pizza Hut opens | First major national pizza chain | American industrial pizza model begins its global spread |
| 1960 | Michigan | Domino’s opens | Delivery model industrialised | Pizza becomes a product that comes to you |
| 2017 | Naples / UNESCO | Neapolitan pizza-making art registered as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage | International recognition of the original form | Italy reclaims cultural ownership of the dish the world had transformed |
Three Things Almost Every Pizza History Article Gets Wrong
Myth 1: Italian soldiers and immigrants spread pizza globally.
This is the comfortable story: Italians go to new countries, bring their food, the world falls in love. It is partially true but significantly overstated. Food historian Carol Helstosky, author of Pizza: A Global History and an associate professor at the University of Denver, has noted that technology did much of the work that immigration gets credit for. Pre-shredded cheese, rotating steel ovens, pre-cut delivery boxes, car culture, the university campus delivery model, frozen pizza technology: these made pizza accessible to people who lived nowhere near an Italian community. The global spread of pizza was at least as much a story about industrialisation as about immigration.
Myth 2: American soldiers discovered pizza in Italy during World War II and brought it home.
This story is repeated constantly, including in published pizza histories. The problem, as food historians have pointed out, is that pizza was in genuinely short supply in wartime Italy. The country was experiencing brutal food shortages under fascist misrule; what soldiers were more likely eating was ration-pack food supplied by the American military, not fresh wood-fired Neapolitan pies. The soldiers almost certainly ate some pizza, particularly after the war ended and they remained stationed in Italy during the occupation period. But the pizza they ate in Italy bore little resemblance to the American versions that became popular in the 1950s — thick-crusted pies, pizza bagels and toppings that would have horrified any Neapolitan. The war accelerated the mainstreaming of Italian-American food culture broadly, which included pizza, but the causal chain is looser than the legend suggests.
Myth 3: The Margherita pizza was invented in 1889.
As covered earlier: the letter is almost certainly forged, the logistics do not add up, and the Association for True Neapolitan Pizza officially places the Margherita’s origin between 1796 and 1810. The dish existed before the queen visit story was constructed around it. What 1889 may have given the pizza was not a birth date but a name and a marketing opportunity that someone, probably in the 1930s, decided to fully exploit. It is a pattern familiar in food history — the same dynamic plays out in the disputed origins of chicken tikka masala, where a tidy inventor story attached itself to a dish that almost certainly evolved collectively.
Why Italy and America Are Still Fighting About Pizza
The UNESCO recognition of Neapolitan pizza-making as an Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2017 was, among other things, a statement. Italy was formally asserting that there is an original, a standard, a right way, and that the world’s proliferating pizza variants are divergences from it.
This matters commercially as well as culturally. True Neapolitan pizza carries specific legal protections in Italy and across the EU. The dough must be hand-stretched. The tomatoes must be San Marzano tomatoes grown in the volcanic soil of the Campania region. The mozzarella must be either buffalo mozzarella or fior di latte from specific Italian regions. It must be cooked in a wood-fired domed oven at around 485 degrees Celsius for 60 to 90 seconds.
That is a very different product from a Pizza Hut stuffed crust, a New York dollar slice, a Chicago deep-dish, a Japanese teriyaki pizza, or a Swedish banana-and-curry pizza (which exists and is, by all accounts, very popular in Sweden, to the considerable distress of Neapolitan pizza makers who have learned about it).
The ongoing cultural negotiation between Italy’s ownership of pizza’s origin and the rest of the world’s ownership of what pizza has become is not going to resolve neatly. It is the same tension that runs through every dish that travels: who gets to define what it is, the place it came from or the places it went? That question has no clean answer for pizza, just as it has none for dishes like falafel, whose origin is fiercely contested across the Middle East, or curry, which transformed so completely as it traveled that the word now means different things in different countries.
The Bottom Line
The history of pizza is a Category A origin story with a spectacular Category C myth sitting in the middle of it. The broad outlines are well documented: Naples, working-class street food, tomatoes from the Americas, 18th-century origin. What is not well documented is the single most famous moment in that history, the Margherita story, which appears to be a later confection designed to give a humble dish a royal pedigree it did not need.
The honest verdict: pizza was a collective invention of poor Neapolitans across a century, not a single inspired moment in a royal kitchen. It reached the world primarily through American industrialisation, chain restaurants and frozen food technology, not through Italian cultural export. The dish most people eat today is an American adaptation that has been globalised and fragmented into hundreds of variants, most of which would be unrecognisable to the lazzaroni of 18th-century Naples. In that sense, pizza belongs to a category of foods whose real history is almost nothing like the official story — much like Pad Thai, which was invented as a nationalist project and marketed as ancient tradition within living memory.
None of that makes it less worth eating. If anything, knowing that pizza conquered the world without royal assistance, without a single inventor and against the active disgust of the Italian upper classes for most of its early history makes the slice in front of you considerably more satisfying.
People Also Ask
Where did pizza originally come from?
Pizza in its modern form originated in Naples, Italy, where working-class residents developed the practice of topping flatbread with tomatoes in the late 18th century. The word “pizza” itself appears in documented records as early as 997 CE in Gaeta, southern Italy, but that reference predates the tomato-topped version by many centuries. Naples is considered the birthplace of modern pizza because of its documented 18th and 19th century street food culture built around the dish.
Who actually invented pizza?
No single person invented pizza. It evolved over time among the working poor of Naples, who were the first to regularly eat tomato-topped flatbread as street food. The often-cited inventor, Raffaele Esposito, is associated with a 1889 story involving Queen Margherita of Savoy, but historians have questioned whether that event happened as described, and the documentary evidence for it — a letter hanging in a Naples pizzeria — has been identified by researchers as a probable forgery.
Is the Margherita pizza really named after Queen Margherita?
This is probably the most repeated origin story in all of pizza history, and it is probably at least partly invented. The story claims that pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito made a patriotic pizza for Queen Margherita in 1889. The only documentary evidence is a letter that historians have identified as inconsistent with authentic royal documents of the period, leading researchers to conclude it is a forgery, likely created by later owners of the restaurant to boost their business. The Association for True Neapolitan Pizza places the Margherita’s actual origin between 1796 and 1810, predating the queen story by decades.
When did pizza become popular in America?
Pizza arrived in America with Italian immigrants in the late 19th century but remained almost entirely within Italian immigrant communities until after World War II. In 1939, the New York Herald Tribune thought it necessary to explain to readers what pizza was and how to pronounce it. The dish broke into mainstream American culture in the late 1940s and 1950s, driven by returning soldiers who had encountered Italian food during the war and by technological changes that made pizza production more accessible. Pizza Hut opened in 1958, Domino’s in 1960, and by the 1970s American-style chain pizza was spreading globally.
What is the difference between Neapolitan pizza and American pizza?
Traditional Neapolitan pizza is defined by strict rules: hand-stretched dough, San Marzano tomatoes, Italian mozzarella, and a wood-fired domed oven at around 485 degrees Celsius producing a thin, soft, slightly charred result in about 90 seconds. American pizza, developed by Italian immigrants working with coal ovens, different cheese and larger appetites, is typically larger, firmer, and considerably more varied in topping. Chicago deep-dish, invented in 1943, is so different structurally from Neapolitan pizza that calling them the same dish is technically accurate but experientially misleading.
Why does Italy have UNESCO protection for Neapolitan pizza?
In 2017, UNESCO inscribed the art of Neapolitan pizza-making on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognising the specific craft traditions and techniques of Neapolitan pizzaiolos. The recognition came after an Italian campaign that was partly cultural — preserving a centuries-old craft — and partly a reaction to the global proliferation of pizza variants that diverge significantly from the original. The protection applies to the craft of making the pizza, not to the pizza name itself.
Did pizza exist before tomatoes?
Yes. Flatbreads with oil, herbs, garlic and sometimes cheese were eaten across the Mediterranean long before tomatoes arrived in Europe. The Roman panis focacius is an ancient ancestor of modern focaccia, and similar topped flatbreads existed across the region. In Naples specifically, flatbread was a working-class staple before the tomato arrived from the Americas in the 16th century. The tomato, initially feared as poisonous by Europeans, was adopted by Neapolitan poor folk and transformed what was a plain flatbread into something approaching the modern dish.
Sources and References
Meet a Long-Lost Father of New York City Pizza — History.com Covers the revisionist history of America’s first pizzeria, drawing on the archival research of pizza historian Peter Regas and his findings on Filippo Milone.
Pizza: A Global History — Reaktion Books publisher page The publisher’s page for Carol Helstosky’s Pizza: A Global History (2008), the most cited academic work on pizza history. Helstosky is an associate professor of history at the University of Denver. Her research on the global spread of pizza and the myths surrounding it underpins much of this article.
Pizza Margherita may be fit for a queen, but was it really named after one? — National Geographic Covers the historical problems with the Margherita origin story in detail, including the discrepancies in the letter, Zachary Nowak’s forgery research, and the logistical issues with the royal visit narrative.
How World War II Brought Pizza from the Battlefields of Italy to America’s Dinner Tables — Military.com Documents the role of the Italian Campaign in exposing American soldiers to pizza, the post-war oregano sales data, and the founding timeline of the major American pizza chains.
How World War II Helped Pizza Become A Beloved American Staple — Tasting Table Covers the Bakers Pride oven development by GI Ira Nevin, the oregano sales figures, and the founding dates of Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, and Domino’s.
Lost Forefathers of Pizza in America Discovered — U.S. Pizza Museum Peter Regas’s own research summary, published by the U.S. Pizza Museum in Chicago, detailing the Filippo Milone findings and the revised history of Lombardi’s pizzeria.
The Father of American Pizza Is Not Who We Thought He Was — Smithsonian Magazine Smithsonian’s coverage of the Regas research, including the discovery of the 1903 Il Telegrafo advertisement and the broader implications for the standard Lombardi origin story.
