Naples — Crazy for Pizza

It seems the people of Naples are endlessly enthusiastic about pizza and the fine differences between different pizzerias. My friend Vincenzo was emoting about his version of the best pizza: “Melts into your mouth, goes straight through the throat and into the stomach. It does not need to be chewed.” I turned my camera on him, and he clammed up a bit…but even so, he gave a sense of the Neapolitan love affair with pizza. The people of Naples claim pizza was born here, and it is clearly the best in Italy. What do you think? Where’s your favorite Italian pizza?

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.

Comments

4 Replies to “Naples — Crazy for Pizza”

  1. No doubt that Naples is gritty, but the pizza is the BEST, even beating out the other capitals of the world : Chicago, New York, London, Paris.

  2. In December 2012 we were in Napoli and waited in line for 2 hours (like everyone else) to get into L’ Antica Pizzeria da Michele. The pizza was simple but melt-in-your-mouth fabulous. We were 5 feet from the wood-burning oven, and watching the guy slide new pizzas into the oven, rearrange them, and slide fnished pizzas out in an almost single motion was fascinating. He seemed used to having mobs of tourists snapping phots over his shoulder, but he kept at his task, and didn’t take time to mug for photos. I imagine the only change they’ve made to the place in the last 50 years was taping a small photo of Julia Roberts to the glass wall of the prep area, a still of her eating their pizza in the movie Eat, Pray, Love. The experience is as much about the atmosphere and the take-a-number-and-wait-with-the-crowd-then-sqeeze-into-the-dining-room arrangement as it is about the pizza. The surrounding neighborhood is pretty sketchy, though, and literally hundreds of used take-out boxes from their pizzaria littered the streets for several blocks around. Broken furniture and trash were also discarded on the sidewalks a block away, as well as thrown into a fenced-off section of old Roman ruins – pretty disrespectful, but the pizza was transcendent.

    In Roma, the shop a few doors down from our Trastevere apartment sold pizza whole or cut into slices with scissors. Its crust was much thicker than in Napoli and the toppings were still simple, 2 or 3 items at most (including Parma ham) but wrapped in foil it made the ideal cheap, portable lunch during sightseeing the next day – maybe the most perfect pizza ever!

  3. I have only been to Naples a couple of time, since most of the time I am visiting Rome toward Northern Italy. However, I do remember eating a Margarita Pizza and just loved it in Naples. I also love the pizza from Rome and Arezzo, so unless it is really bad, I would have to say I love most of the pizza’s that I have eaten on my visit to Italy. But I usually get a simple one, not real fancy and not too many things on it.

  4. I almost took a train from Rome to Sicily, via Naples, a few years back, but instead decided to fly to Sicily (actually, the flight was cheaper than a train and far quicker!). That said, every time I read a Rick Steves entry on Naples, I keep kicking myself “why didn’t I go there?!”. Haha. Need to work that into my next trip to Italia.

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