What Neapolitan pizza is, and how it reached Lake Atitlán

1730 · Naples

Street food for people with no table

In Naples pizza was not born in a restaurant: it was born in the street. Sellers carried it in tin boxes on their heads and sold it by the slice to the lazzari, the poorest people in town. There was the pizza a otto: you ate it today and paid in eight days. Flour on credit, literally.

1830 · Port Alba

The first pizzeria in the world

On Port Alba street, where a pizza stand had operated since 1738, the Antica Pizzeria Port Alba opened in 1830: tables, chairs and an oven built of Vesuvius volcanic stone. For the first time pizza stopped being something you ate while walking.

A queen, three colours

The Margherita

Naples tells that pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito made three pizzas for Queen Margherita of Savoy and that she chose tomato, mozzarella and basil: red, white and green, the flag. Historians still argue over dates and details, but the name stuck.

2017 · UNESCO

The gesture was protected, not the dish

On 7 December 2017 UNESCO inscribed the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo on the list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Spinning the dough by hand, reading the fire, being the pizzaiolo of the neighbourhood: a way of being in the world, not a recipe.

That same chain of gestures ends in Panajachel, facing Lake Atitlán. At Grazia the dough is living sourdough rested 24 to 48 hours. Eat it hot: in Naples they say a pizza that waits is a pizza that gives up.