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Pizza is an international word, understandable in all languages, and pizzas can be found in practically every country in the world. Why?

All about the pizza
[Susan Glasspool]

The answer is that pizzas are simple to make, the ingredients are easily found and inexpensive and the finished product is one of the healthiest foods you can eat.
Pizzas are popular with everyone from peasants to multimillionaires and happily transform themselves from munchy finger foods to refined restaurant delicacies. Their history is rooted in the Mediterranean, an evolution of the early unleavened bread, baked on stones, though the pizza as we know it today was created about 200 years ago in Naples and area as a cheap and nourishing food for the poor (though a Bronze age form of pizza was found in Lake Garda, near Verona). Pizzas became so popular that Naples was to be forever linked with its name and the thousands of immigrants to North and South America (many from Southern Italy and Liguria) took the recipe with them, making it equally popular there. Today of course there are endless variations in the original pizza recipe, the toppings can be anything from savoury to sweet, and naturally rely on what ingredients can easily be found locally. The fact that it is basically a flat slab of bread, seasoned with local products, makes it lose it geographical origins and links it with practically every cuisine in the world as most countries have always relied on filling hungry mouths with the traditional breads, which are often flat and unleavened, from Turkey to India, Greece to Africa, Israel to Spain, Iran, Iraq and the Arab States. All that is required to make a pizza-type base is the flour of some sort of cereal and a source of heat. Mexican tortillas and the rice cakes in many Far Eastern countries are all created in the same way, by pressing, kneading and flattening the dough by hand into circular shapes (recalling the sun, the moon or the wheel). The toppings or stuffings added to these breads are yet another similarity to the Italian pizza.
The pizza has another great quality. Its low cost makes it possible for almost any family, however poor, to afford to go out for an evening to eat it and thus pizza restaurants abound throughout the world. Today the pizza has offshoots in pizza parties, snack-like pizza slices, mini-pizzas for starters and takeaways (however a healthier alternative to hamburgers).
The nourishment that can be found in a pizza of course depends on the topping, which can include cheese, meat, tomato, vegetables, herbs or simply spices. The widespread presence of pizza restaurants throughout the world has led to the original Neapolitan version finding local surrogates, so that it has lost its national identity, especially in the United States, where it is now considered a typical American food, along with hamburgers and Coke. A real take-over! June 4th has been declared National Pizza Day in the States (something that does not appear to exist in Italy, though perhaps it should be introduced!). Today it is therefore thought of as a quick, cheap and easy meal (fast food?!),
Thanks to its lack of grain, Japan does not have any bread-making traditions, and therefore revers the pizza as an authentic ethnic Italian food, expecting its imported pizza restaurants to be of the very highest quality and to use only the best ingredients.
The pizza differs greatly from pasta. The pizza is thriftiness combined with creativity, answering a desire for variety, while pasta, still considered typically Italian, is varied, complex and a multiple trap that always needs some sort of topping. It must be said, however, in spite of all the external influences, from America in particular, that Italian cooking has retained its traditional qualities, uncontaminated by fashions from abroad. It still tends to concentrate on characteristic local dishes, instead of those dictated by fashion or international whims, and preferably cooked as Mum used to make it, rather than by a French trained chef.


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